{"id":33196,"date":"2017-09-06T01:00:54","date_gmt":"2017-09-06T05:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=33196"},"modified":"2018-09-18T11:09:48","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T15:09:48","slug":"qotd-suicidalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/06\/qotd-suicidalism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Suicidalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>The most important weapons of <em>al-Qaeda<\/em> and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West\u2019s will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all. <\/p>\n<p>But <em>al-Qaeda<\/em> didn\u2019t create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West\u2019s intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western intellectual life.<\/p>\n<p>Consider the following propositions: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There is no truth, only competing agendas.<\/li>\n<li>All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism\/Fascism\/Islam are vitiated by the West\u2019s history of racism and colonialism.<\/li>\n<li>There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.<\/li>\n<li>The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.<\/li>\n<li>Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.<\/li>\n<li>Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.<\/li>\n<li>The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)<\/li>\n<li>For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.<\/li>\n<li>But &#8220;oppressed&#8221; people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.\n\t<\/li>\n<li>When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist\u2019s point of view, and make concessions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism, multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, \u201cpolitical correctness\u201d to name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by their right name: suicidalism.<\/p>\n<p>Eric S. Raymond, <a href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=218\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Suicidalism&#8221;, <em>Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2005-09-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53,41],"tags":[387,1235,651,351,1020,269,433],"class_list":["post-33196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-alqaeda","tag-esr","tag-multiculturalism","tag-politicalcorrectness","tag-progressives","tag-propaganda","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8Dq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33196"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":39941,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33196\/revisions\/39941"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}