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BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

JULY 1-3, 1863

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646,392

The liberal bigot

by Robert Henderson

Like all organisms the liberal bigot is an evolved creature, although the character traits which made him – hypocrisy, the wish to create the world in one’s own image, paternalism, a sense of moral superiority, a desire to gratuitously interfere with the lives of others, false humility, self- indulgent masochism and a pathological refusal to accept evidence which contradicts emotionally based beliefs – are as old as civilised man. Those who know their history will readily recognise the basic personality of the liberal bigot for it is that of the Puritan.

Very primitive types existed in the ancient world – Plato’s Socrates has much of the Liberal Bigot’s smugness and ability to ignore the facts of human nature – but it was not until eighteenth century that creatures displaying most of the modern Liberal Bigot’s general features emerged in the shape of men such as William Wilberforce and Jeremy Bentham.

But Wilberforce and Bentham still had some moral sense and it is Shelley who perhaps first displays the peculiar humbugging amorality of the modern liberal bigot with his continual prating about his love for “mankind”, whilst behaving abominably to all and sundry.

The nineteen thirties saw the first indubitably modern liberal bigot described by Friedrich Hayek when he had found one called Harold Laski at the LSE. To be sure Laski did not have certain of the detailed traits associated with the liberal bigot of our time, for example the hatred of academic success in the working class, nor did he possess the instinct to dissemble his paternalism, but he had that quintessential quality of the fully developed Liberal Bigot, an intellectualised pseudo-morality or, to put it more exactly, ethical rules without moral context.

Since the discovery of Laski, liberal bigots have become increasingly common and they are now a very widely spread pest. They are particularly fond of habitats such as politics, the arts, universities, the media and the social services. The liberal bigot can be found in all western societies, but nowhere does the creature have such success as within the precincts of the Anglo-Saxon world, where they have captured political control of their societies.

The liberal bigot’s ideological and psychological starting point is the fantasy, which he maintains in the face of all the evidence, that man is a generally malleable creature who can be changed by social engineering to create a world fit for Liberal Bigots, although in so thinking the liberal bigot misunderstands his own psychology for he would find such a place supremely uncongenial. No more would he be able to posture in the public eye because there would be no matters occasioning expressions of liberal bigot moral outrage or excuses for paternalistic action. Even more alarmingly, in a realised liberal bigot society, the liberal bigot might be forced to match his behaviour to his words. However, the liberal bigot may rest easy in his bed for such a world is but fit for dreams.

The liberal bigot has but one general principle but what a principle it is, being so all embracing that no other is needed. The liberal bigot holds as an article of faith that no discrimination should be made between human beings regardless of man’s natural inclinations and Nature’s distinction by sex, sexual inclination, race, colour, culture, class, talent, intelligence, education, personality,

physical condition and age, unless, of course, the person judged is female, homosexual, non-Caucasian, poor, stupid, uneducated, old or crippled. Then the liberal bigot may discriminate to his heart’s content, although in the weasel wording manner of Lenin’s ‘democratic centralism’ he calls it ’positive discrimination and thinks it not in the least ”judgemental”. This he has institutionalised in a totalitarian system called political correctness.

Above all things the liberal bigot delights in what he calls racism, which in practice means the white man defending his own interests or extolling his own culture. This the liberal bigot has raised to the status of the great modern blasphemy. Just as once the Holy Office caused men to be burned for denying the literal truth of transubstantiation, so just as surely does the liberal bigot wish to immolate those who distinguish amongst their fellows on the most natural grounds of all, a sense of kinship, of shared culture and experience. So central is this tenet to modern liberal bigotry that the liberal bigot has moved in the past forty years from believing that racial discrimination is bad to asserting that multiracial societies are a positive good.

The fact that such societies always experience considerable friction between their various racial components is not, of course, taken as evidence by the liberal bigot that he is wrong, but as ammunition for promoting more restrictions on the white population and further reason for indulging in positive orgies of European cultural denigration.

At some level the liberal bigot realises that his creed is at odds with reality. So, following in the footsteps of religious intellectuals such as Acquinas and political theorists such as Marx, he creates an elaborate fictional world which is baldly represented as “natural” or “right”, and reality ”unnatural” and ”wrong”, even though intellectually the liberal bigot would deny any objective morality or measure of cultural worth. Like all those who adopt intellectually indefensible ideologies, the liberal bigot makes disbelief a heresy and punishes it with a gamut of sanctions which range from exclusion from public life through simple expressions of distaste to the passing of laws threatening fines and imprisonment for those who express the “wrong” opinions.

Morality exercises a peculiar difficulty for the liberal bigot for he is caught between believing in moral relativism and a desire to impose his own standards on the world, for which he cannot, necessarily, have any absolute sanction. This dilemma is partially solved by the development of an amoral personality and by using doublethink to hide the intellectual contradiction.

The liberal bigot decries “nationalism” but he is also a firm advocate of cultural expression provided, of course, the people concerned are within his approved ideological circle of deserving causes. That a sense of cultural worth and identity is practically indistinguishable from nationalism the liberal bigot cannot accept so he represents the two as opposites. When pressed with disloyalty, he often makes a spurious distinction between patriotism and nationalism and says he is “proud” of such things as Britain’s history of providing sanctuary for refugees, which trait, when translated to the nature and level of modern population movements, is of course of the greatest possible disadvantage to the receiving country. If he is in the media he will crudely mock the idea of national feeling by being absurdly jingoistic in trivial matters as in the statement

“The space shuttle took off today. The plastic wrappers for the food were British.” His hysterical laughter at any suggestion that Churchill or Wellington might be worthy of respect changes to a childlike reverence when his thoughts turn to such vicious charlatans as Che Guevara.

The liberal bigot wishes to enjoy the material wealth, physical security and intellectual tolerance of the advanced civilisation in which they live, whilst decrying all the institutions and habits which have produced this happy state. He publicly laments such things as poverty, but he reacts most strongly to suggestions that his personal wealth should be expended on those causes supposedly dear to his heart – it is to the public purse that the liberal bigot looks, first, second and last. He extols the virtues of “working class” or ”ethnic” customs and values, but takes good care to avoid contact with unreconstructed members of such groups by living well away from or cocooning himself within a gentrified part of their areas.

In truth, the liberal bigot has little knowledge of the groups whom he purports to champion. Loving humanity in the mass, he finds their individual reality at odds with his ideology and personal inclinations. Even worse he cannot but suspect that the downtrodden prole or black does not take him seriously, that in some curious way he is patronised by the very people he imagines desperately need his help. Now if there is one thing which enrages the liberal bigot above all others it is not being taken seriously. While uttering a great deal of cant about how much he is against snobbery, how he is just a common man no different from anyone else in the street, the liberal bigot is mortally offended when he is taken at his word.

The liberal bigot decries privilege but excepts it eagerly when the beneficiary is himself or other liberal bigots. How cleverly he creates jobs and status for those of a like mind. He is always pushing for more , and better paid, Social Workers, teachers and Race Relations operatives, whom he constantly refers to as “professionals”. Indeed, on the question of formal status he can be decidedly touchy. For one who supposedly embraces egalitarianism this is rather strange, but then not so odd when the Liberal Bigot’s propensity for hypocrisy is considered for there is nothing he likes so much as having his cake and eating it.

The liberal bigot is the enemy of social opportunity for all but his likeminded fellows. The happy recipient of social and educational opportunities which permit him to enter the magic circle of Liberal Bigotry, his voice is always to be heard berating the value of such things for what he calls “The underprivileged” . To this end he speaks of the worth of ”working class” and “ethnic” cultures which, of course, cannot be preserved if “middle class” values are foisted upon their members. And this is scarcely to be wondered at for the liberal bigot is essentially undemocratic. A politically sophisticated and educated working class capable of effectively challenging liberal bigot ideas is the last thing the liberal bigot wants. Besides, without them who would he have to patronise so superbly?

The self-conscious masochism of the liberal bigot knows no bounds. Like the medieval Christian who cried “I am the humblest of men”, he commits the sin of pride in a peculiarly distasteful manner as he seeks approbation under the guise of self-denigration. How diligently he vies with others to prove that his society is the guiltiest of colonial and cultural oppression; how relentlessly he denigrates his own people’s cultural and intellectual achievements.

What will be the future of the Liberal Bigot? Like the nautilus with its ever increasing spiral, the liberal bigot continues to evolve regardless of specific advantage. He acknowledges no sense of belonging or cultural indebtedness, whilst exhibiting a truly unthinking arrogance in his belief that no matter what he does or what cause he supports, his own person will be inviolate, both intellectually and materially. In fact, the liberal bigot exhibits the classic behaviour of the parasite. He enjoys benefits gained at the expense of the host, in this case Anglo-Saxon society. But parasites can only be successful in the long run if they do not so weaken the host that it is eventually unable to support them. Consequently, the liberal bigot is unlikely to survive in his present form for very long because he shows no capacity for controlling his voracious appetite for incontinent abuse of his environment.

German Left Ramps Up Attacks on Islam Critics

 

June 18, 2013 

By Andrew Harrod 

 National parliamentarians from Die Linke, Germany’s post-communist Left Party, recently presented the federal German government with a Minor Inquiry (Kleine Anfrage or KA) concerning the government’s policy towards the conservative German website Politically Incorrect (PI).  This is only the latest effort by left-wing multiculturalists to quash open discussion, and criticism on Islam by designating the discourse “anti-democratic”and “right-wing extremist.”
As the online rules of order for the German parliament or Bundestag explain, the KA in Section 104 allows the Bundestag’s president to receive questions for the federal government about “certain delineated areas.” Normally the president calls upon the government to answer the questions in writing within 14 days, although agreement with the KA authors can extend this time limit.  As the German-language KA Wikipedia entry explains, this procedure serves as a means of parliamentary control over the government by calling upon it to give account of a given state of affairs.
Die Linke’s May 13, 2013, KA (document 17/13573, available in PDF format here) notes that “Islam-hostile internet portals” like PI with its “tens of thousands of visitors daily” and parties such as the Freedom Party (Die Freiheit) and Germany’s Pro movement (Pro NRW/Pro Deutschland) “warn against a supposed ‘Islamization of Europe.’”  In PI reader comments, meanwhile, Muslims “are collectively humiliated and denigrated in a racist, xenophobic, insulting, hate-filled, and at times violence-glorifying manner.”
Referenced by the KA and previously reported by this author (see here and here), PI and Die Freiheit, with common members such as Michael Stürzenberger, have conducted a petition drive for a referendum to stop a proposed Center for Islam in Europe-Munich (Zentrum für Islams in Europa-München or ZIE-M).  The KA references a story from the Munich-based German national newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung discussing how Stürzenberger commonly compares the Koran with Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Die Freiheit rallies have featured signs stating “Christ is truth, Muhammad is a lie.” Previously reported by this author as well (see here and here), the KA also notes that the Bavarian Office of Constitutional Protection (Verfassungsschutz) has recently begun monitoring Bavarian chapters of PI/Die Freiheit due to “anti-constitutional” sentiments.
A previous August 18, 2011, Die Linke KA (17/6823)  had also dealt with PI/Die Freiheit in the wake of the July 22, 2011, massacre perpetrated in Norway by Anders Behring Brevik.  This earlier KA bemoaned in Germany an “increasing hostility to Islam precisely among high earners and people with high levels of education.” In this context “populist and xenophobic campaigns against ‘Islam’” appeared to the “extreme right in Europe” as a “recipe for success for their propaganda” and an “entrance ticket into the political middle.” Die Freiheit was one of several attempts to found “anti-Islam parties” while PI had become a “central forum of Islam haters in the German-speaking area.”
Yet in citing an article from Berlin’s leftwing Tageszeitung (taz), the 2011 KA noted that the federal Verfassungsschutz had not deemed PI’s outlook as anti-constitutional given PI’s self-professed “pro-Israeli, pro-American” character.  The article noted additionally PI’s “emphatic profession of loyalty to the Grundgesetz,” Germany’s Basic Law or constitution.
The government’s answer on September 5, 2011, (17/6910) to the various questions concerning matters such as membership and statements of PI/Die Freiheit and other groups in the 2011 KA continued this analysis. With respect to Die Freiheit, there were “not sufficient indications” to classify Die Freiheit as “rightwing extremist.” The “overwhelming majority of PI entries,” meanwhile, “made no use of classical rightwing extremist argumentation patterns, but rather was to be situated within the Islam-critical spectrum.” While some PI contributions had “anti-Muslim or in parts even racist content,” these were “practically exclusively” in the comments section and were “even there the exception.” Thus a “rightwing extremist effort (still) did not allow itself to be discerned” at PI.
Not to be deterred, Die Linke responded on October 31, 2011, with yet another KA (17/7569) about “anti-Muslim agitation” citing several sources such as newspapers warning against PI, Die Freiheit, and other groups.  In this KA, Die Linke indicated that it was not so much interested in a “secret service surveillance of the Islam- and Muslim-hostile scene” by the federal Verfassungschutz as a “societal ostracism of this body of thought just like every other form of racism and anti-Semitism.” Among other questions, Die Linke wanted to know what connections PI had to “religious groupings from the evangelical, dogmatic-Catholic, and old Catholic milieus.” The government’s response (17/7761) on November 17, 2011, however, reiterated the position taken in 17/6910 and noted that “individual statements” did not suffice to define an entity as “extremist” but rather demanded an “overall observation.”
In 17/13573 Die Linke repeated many of its previous questions and inquired whether the federal government still maintains its previous outlook in light of recent Bavarian decisions.  This is the latest Die Linke salvo in an ongoing campaign to bring about a self-proclaimed political “ostracism” of PI/Die Freiheit and other groups.  Yet the irony was not lost on Stürzenberger, who pointed out to PI that Die Linke, with much of its roots in East Germany’s Communist Party, is itself an object of federal Verfassungsschutz surveillance.
The future of a free and open discussion of Islam in Germany seems perilous with the likes of Die Linke, a totalitarian-legacy group, continually demonstrating its propensity to use the German federal government as a tool of intimidation against Islam’s critiques.