Homophobia, Islamophobia and Other Perversions of the Left

The greatest task on the right, therefore, is to rescue the language of politics: to put within our grasp what has been forcibly removed from it by jargon. It is only when we have found again the language that is natural to us that we can answer the great accusations that are constantly thrown at our world from the left.  And it is only when we have found that language that we can move on from the one-dimensional left/ right, with us/ against us, progressive/ reactionary dichotomies that have so often made rational discussion impossible. (Scruton, Roger (2015-10-08). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 6036-6039). Bloomsbury Publishing.  Kindle Edition.)

The current language of dichotomized politics, as the eminent philosopher Roger Scruton states above, demands a great deal of “rescue” work. We must aggressively dispute the use of the jargon that the left has insinuated into our political conversations and polemics, words that both distort reality and give the ideologues on the left undue power to manipulate, worse, to dominate the discussion of issues of great moral, political and social import.  With their jargon they exert their pernicious influence and constantly aim to impugn the motives of those who disagree with them.  Built into the language of the left is the ammunition for an insidious, sustained and long term campaign of nullification and character assassination.

Let us begin our rescue of political language with a repudiation of two of the most odious and egregious pieces of jargon now foisted on us (“thrown at our world from the left”) on a daily basis – “homophobia” and “Islamophobia.”

What in today’s common parlance is a homophobe?  For the polemicists and their censorious patrons on the left a homophobe is anyone and everyone who voices disapproval of homosexual activity and disputes the concept and legitimacy of homosexual marriage.  This disapproval often has religious grounds and, of course, because it is argued from sources and convictions of religious belief, authority or scripture it is considered by the secularist oriented Left as beneath serious moral and political consideration. Certain kinds of moral concepts are off-the-table, so to speak. Religious traditions, practices and values, that have for millennia shaped and informed our morals and social practices now with a with a snap-snap of a finger from these nouveau Jacobins are supposed to be discarded as we suddenly realize how unenlightened we’ve been, how virtuous they are and how much better the world will be with them in charge. 

The neologism “homophobe” was coined to make it sound objective and “clinical”, the sort of jargon used by psychologists and various “experts” to show that they have penetrated the fog and demystified the prevailing superstitions. They understand what the rest of us may at some later time hope to comprehend.  Thus, those unfortunate enough to be in the grasp of homophobia are, well, sick, sick in the sense of psychological aberration or derangement. Phobias are by their nature irrational, unfounded in reality, overreactions to fear, insecurity or anxiety. 

Phobia:  a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational. 

There you have it: this is pretty much a common understanding of what a phobia is – in more parochial terms, phobic people are crazy. You don’t reason with crazy people.  Only trained professionals take what crazy people say seriously but only as it is symptomatic of mental aberration.  You do not have rational conversation and respectful exchange with a homophobic individual about homosexuality because he has no standing as a normal, thoughtful person. He is immersed in bigotry or “hatred” as the left prefers to describe the disapproval of behavior they condone. 

Where, however, is the phobia to be found in the so called typical homophobe? What is asserted does not match reality. They neither fear nor hate homosexuals and they don’t wish to interfere in their lives and punish them. Their aversion to homosexuality is not irrational: it is philosophical and theological. “Homophobia” is not a description of anything real: it is a label contrived to smear those who disagree: it is nothing more than an ad hominem argument in shorthand posing as received social science wisdom.

Homophobes, however, are not just sick: they are “intolerant”. Here is a word kidnapped by left and given a completely distorted meaning, that being: toleration = approval.  So, if you don’t approve of something, ergo, you must be intolerant. But if one considers the logic that should apply to the use of “tolerant” it follows that one can be only be tolerant of what one disapproves of: if you already approve of a behavior, creed or habit, you don’t need to tolerate it. There is considerable irony with all of this because the left disapproves of (despises and excoriates, actually) conservatives, right-wingers, and traditionally religious people (“bitter clingers” as Barack Obama refers to them) but regard themselves as the most open minded and tolerant people around. 

The fact that the “gay lifestyle” has been normalized in our increasingly secularized culture and that homosexuals live openly and prosperously, in some places proudly as “gay” would suggest that toleration is at least moderately in place and relatively widespread. However, the left, despite what they say, do not want toleration of homosexuality: they demand, and are intent on coercing, approval of it. Their dishonest and coercive strategy is to place anyone who does not embrace the complete normalization of homosexuality as a “lifestyle” outside the moral and political boundaries of American life. In our diverse multi-cultural society, since when, it seems fair to ask, does someone have the right to coerce someone else into approving of their morals?

Toleration is giving moral and physical space to someone you disagree with. “You leave me alone (with respect to our differences); I’ll leave you alone, and we’ll agree to disagree and go about our separate business.” The huge advantage of real toleration is the buffer of time that it offers.  Over time, toleration with its norm of respectful live-let-live disagreement helps to soften people on all sides and make them more understanding of each other. The gradual development of the norm of toleration beginning in 17^th century Europe over time enabled initially very hostile Christian sects to reduce their hostility and accept, though not necessarily approve of their differences. But of course for the left, if you disagree, you are to remain silent while your intelligence and character are impugned and your religious freedoms are extinguished. 

In moving from homophobia to Islamophobia similar ideological motives are masked by the use of language that, again, as Roger Scruton notes, attempts “to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it.” (Scruton, Roger. Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 4916-4917).

“Islamophobia” deserves a great deal of scrutiny as it is an attempt to change reality by the way we describe it.  The term has a short history, probably not more that 20 or 25 years.  Did Islamophobes suddenly come into existence a couple of decades ago?  If not, what were they and where were they before?  If so, what suddenly gave rise to yet another phobia the left loves to lecture us about? And, in light of what the militant followers of Islam have been about in the last few years, perhaps the fear that they have generated of Islam is not completely irrational.  Is it mere coincidence that Islamophobia emerged about the time followers of Islam, in the name of Islam, were engaged in horrific acts of terrorism all across the globe – the U.S., Middle East, Europe, Africa, Asia. Is it also coincidental that during this time we have no record of Buddhists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Mormons or Mennonites crashing airliners into sky scrapers, mass kidnapping and force-marrying young girls, making You Tube videos of beheadings and immolations and establishing by conquest a theocratic state? There are reasons why the word “Islamophobia” has been invented and not “Christanophobia”, “Mormonophobia” or “Buddhophobia” which have nothing to do with what those who coined and use this word want us to believe.

Just who are these Islamophobes who suddenly have sprung into being? Here is how the folks who know all about these things at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender explain it:

Islamophobia is a contrived fear or prejudice fomented by the existing Eurocentric and Orientalist global power structure.  It is directed at a perceived or real Muslim threat through the maintenance and extension of existing disparities in economic, political, social and cultural relations, while rationalizing the necessity to deploy violence as a tool to achieve "civilizational rehab" of the target communities (Muslim or otherwise).  Islamophobia reintroduces and reaffirms a global racial structure through which resource distribution disparities are maintained and extended.  (http://crg.berkeley.edu/content/islamophobia/defining-islamophobia)

So, this particular phobia is the product of a “global power structure”, which of course makes it all crystal clear if you are content with sheer vacuity.  And, what kind of a global power structure?  The “existing Eurocentric and Orientalist” one, which I guess is more menacing than one that doesn’t exist.  This is stated as if we are all supposed to know what precise meanings to attach to “Eurocentric” and “Orientalist” but these terms, like “Islamophobia”, are recent constructs, only intelligible to the ideologues who invented them and like the way they sound. They are vague terms of disapprobation rather than description. One can discover almost any kind of global power structure that readily fits one’s imagination and will bare the blame for the world’s many disparities – International Jewish bankers, the Tri-Lateral Commission, etc. The Berkeley “experts” are sloganeers, and here above is a medley of tropes that fill the left’s lexicon of agitprop designed to arouse those already indoctrinated. Nothing concrete, real or identifiable is doing the “fomenting” of fear and prejudice.  Even more preposterous is the claim that Islamophobia “reintroduces and affirms a “global racial structure …” etc.  How does an abstraction like Islamophobia bring a “global racial structure” into being? (Note the contrived parallelism of vacuous phrases: “global power structure” – “global racial structure”) What IS a “global racial structure, and what does Islam have to do with race?  It is a religion!

Any one of any race can be a Muslim.  This purported definition is a masterpiece of verbal smog and incoherence.  

      

“[T]he first concern of revolutionary movements on the left,” again to quote Roger Scruton, “has been to capture the language, to change reality by changing the way we describe and therefore the way we perceive it. Revolution begins from an act of falsification, exemplified equally in the French and the Russian Revolutions, as in the cultural revolutions of the contemporary campus.” (Scruton, Roger (2015-10-08). Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left (Kindle Locations 4916-4917).

“Homophobia” and “Islamophobia” are not words that accurately describe people or capture any of their distinctive attributes or conditions.  They are perversions, means of falsification, as Scruton notes, language designed not to reflect reality and speak the truth, but to serve ideological purposes and the acquisition of power.  Anyone who wishes to participate in an intelligent, serious conversation on homosexuality and contemporary Islam should vigorously resist the efforts of anyone who uses these words as if they are anything other than the vehicles of their ad hominem attacks and obfuscation in the service of cultural revolution.   

Diversity-Speak: Animal Farm at Wright State University

When talking about race-relations in America these days one cannot overstate how corrupt the use of language has become. “Racism” is now a term of art reserved for demagogues, ideologues, character assassins and “professionals” who make a career of their race.  An honest, dispassionate discussion of race in America is verboten, and nowhere does the production of verbal smog with its semantic deformation and fake moralism on this subject rise more rapidly to match the level of Soviet-era, Pravda-style Newspeak than on the campuses of American universities.  

In most American universities there are now firmly entrenched “diversity” commissars -- here a Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, there an Associate Provost of Multiculturalism, everywhere a PC zealot with a hefty title, a heftier salary, and a job description written in the indecipherable argot of "Diversity-speak."  These are people with no real jobs. Installed by craven university presidents they serve as scolds and busybodies, self-proclaimed authorities on whatever might hurt the feelings of those in the currently certified victim classes. Within their purview are micro-aggressions, trigger warnings, safe spaces and correct usage of pronouns in the service of transgenderism. Since these czars, are charged with conjuring into reality such elusive and nebulous abstractions like diversity, inclusion, equity, etc., who can ever remotely guess what it is that they are actually doing?

The language of academic Diversity-Speak is a subgenre of Newspeak. Its constricted vocabulary and closely regulated grammar make it into a straight jacket of ideological orthodoxy the constraints of which no one is supposed to break out of. The key words, in typical Orwellian fashion, are twisted beyond normal recognition. Everyone knows this: everyone pretends otherwise. 

The diversity VP at any typical university now serves as the institutional superego. He/she plays the role of the priest, a stern moralist who intones the politically correct incantations, but, most importantly, functions as the living symbol of the university’s vigilance against what must never be tolerated in even the slightest degree, racism and its spin offs – sexism, ableism, homophobia, the forced march on to infinity.  This is no small task since racism and its feral cousins are now so pervasive and manifest themselves in so much abundance, some of their forms so recondite, only to be discernible by the priest and his acolytes.  Thus: institutional racism, systemic racism, casual racism, overt racism, covert racism, legacy racism, environmental racism, economic racism -- on it metastasizes with an ever more complex taxonomy yet to be constructed and guaranteed job security for the well-paid necromancers.  

These high level diversity positions are steeped in perversity so glaringly obvious that the fact that no one can mention it (resistance is futile) suggests that higher education is now firmly in the grip of political extortionists and con-artists posing as moralists. The ludicrous perversity is that of the inevitable motive of self-interest built into the heart of the “diversity profession.” The more racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic an institution is (the more victims there are to attend to), of course, the greater the role, the higher the charge, the larger the entourage, the more power there will be for the officially anointed voices of the voiceless.  Attending to lots of victims requires lots of resources – increased personnel, more offices, bigger budgets for travel to conferences on diversity, the Diversity & Inclusion Conference & Exposition in San Francisco, October 2017, for example. https://conferences.shrm.org/diversity-conference  What chief diversity officer anywhere, even if he wanted to, would admit to a serious reduction in all the “isms” and “phobias” in the institution where he is employed?  Fewer “isms” and “phobias” mean fewer staff, diminished influence, less visibility, ultimately another line of work with more accountability.

But to return to the notion of the corruption of language, specifically Diversity-Speak, focus for a moment on the recent official announcement (below) of the appointment of a Diversity Chief at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio. The announcement is worth parsing since it is so generic and tediously formulary that it could come out of almost any American university or college.  The language in the announcement, as should become obvious momentarily, is stereotypical, banal Diversity-Speak. Its design, ironically, is to say nothing that any remotely thoughtful and reasonable person would say depicts any aspect of reality. This is not language that is meant to reveal or describe anything but rather to soothe and misdirect.  

   

Matthew Boaz, Wright State University’s director of equity and inclusion, has been named to the new position of chief diversity officer….. Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access. He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented students, strengthening recruiting efforts and coordinating Title IX policies. As chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership in promoting a campus culture that supports diversity and inclusion, forging strong partnerships with students, faculty and staff. “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with the university,”…..   http://webapp2.wright.edu/web1/newsroom/2017/02/21/matthew-boaz-named-chief-diversity-officer-at-wright-state/

To begin: “Boaz is a nationally recognized leader in diversity, inclusion, equity and access.” “Nationally recognized leader”?  Beyond a ten mile radius from Dayton, Ohio no one could be found who ever heard of this guy. This lead-off talking point is a throw-away line, sufficiently vague and ill-defined as to be meaningless. One might ponder the dubious premise behind this fake encomium and speculate that anyone with a ‘diversity’ title can rise to this stature since there are no recognized standards or measurement of achievement that could be offered in support.  

  

To continue: “He has extensive experience in helping underrepresented students….”  Who were these students? Where were they?  What did he do to help them? What did he help them do?  Why did they need help?  No clue (wink-wink, it is obvious, isn’t it?). All we are supposed to know is that he is a guy who helps people, well, the right sort of people. What else does one need to be to be a diversity VP?  Just string together a few more of those vague generalities and bolster the fiction that there is a large contingent of needy people who will flounder without him.   

On to “partnerships”: As chief diversity officer, Boaz will provide leadership… in forging strong partnerships with students, faculty and staff.  Ah, yes, the obligatory “forging partnerships”, another key filler phrase to signal how busy he will be but with no clue about what he will be doing.  What kind of partnerships? Why are they necessary? What have these partnerships achieved in the past that make them valuable?  

It gets worse: “One of my goals as chief diversity officer is to create and maintain an environment in which every member of the Wright State community will feel valued because of their unique identity and authentic self so they are proud of their experience with the university,” Boaz said.

Clearly, Mr. Boaz won’t be wasting his time on trying to appear modest.  The sum total of “every member of the Wright State community” if you count students, faculty and staff, would be in excess of 20,000 people, each with a “unique identity and authentic self”.  Unclear is how he will have time for any other goals, much less time for basics like eating, sleeping and finding the men's room  -- Oops, the gender neutral restroom. Still, given that Wright State University draws many of its students from the surrounding conservative rural counties, it seems reasonable to conjecture that some them might possess an “authentic self” (perhaps a traditional Christian self) that will not sit well with the pronoun-neutral apparatchiks in Student Affairs who warm the seats in (are you ready?) The Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer & Ally Affairs. One needs to twist furiously away on the Diversity hermeneutical-decoder magic ring just to decipher the meaning of the office title and to guess at how the people inside fill their days. Those members of the “WSU community” who can’t quite get the hang of transgenderism and its Talmudic pronoun assignment challenges might have to undergo a compulsory “attitude adjustment”, a correction to their not-quite authentic selves so as to emerge proud of their experience.  

This announcement is PR gobbledygook.  No one should take it seriously and it is likely that few people do.  It was written and issued no doubt with the hope that no one would pay it too much attention, and thus suggests how crude and cynical is the rationalizing of what diversity people are all about and how spineless the university administrators are who sic them on everyone else.  

Leonard Shapiro, a prolific historian of Soviet history and politics in attempting to distill the essence of Stalinist era propaganda wrote that “the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade, but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought reveals itself as jarring dissonance.” (The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Random House, 1971, p. 477) The above example of Diversity-Speak resembles the propaganda described by Shapiro -- no attempt to convince or persuade -- just a predictable uniform public utterance to discourage dissonant thinking and remind everyone that the right people are still in charge.   

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Blackmail, The Left’s Way to Destroy Free Speech

“In the same way the intelligentsia for many years labored unconsciously to destroy itself by hesitancy and submission in the face of unremitting blackmail from the extreme left.”

                   Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism

The “intelligentsia” referred to above by Leszek Kolakowski in his magisterial work on the history of Marxism is the class of Russian intellectuals that succumbed to Stalin’s usurpations in the 1930s. Once Stalin had obliterated his opposition by the late-1930s, genuine intellectual inquiry and the possibility for an open, honest examination and criticism of ideas and vigorous philosophical and scientific exchange essentially ended.    

The destruction of the intelligentsia that Kolakowski observed in Russia under the Bolsheviks bears an eerie resemblance to what has taken place here in the U.S. since the 1960s with the left in a non-stop, accelerated assault on American institutions.  The instrument of the destruction Kolakowski refers to is “unremitting blackmail” which now abounds. “Hesitancy and submission” are the order of the day from craven, pusillanimous university administrators such as the President of the University of California, Donna Shalala, an American Andrei Zhandov.  Her recent diktat to the UC faculty on “microaggressions” is truly ominous. See the elaborate censorship code online at the UC’s President’s Office website.

(http://www.ucop.edu/academic-personnel-programs/_files/seminars/Tool_Recognizing_Microaggressions.pdf.)

“Blackmail”, this single word perhaps best describes the modus operandi of the left in shutting down the long-prized freedom of speech and tolerance for the expression of unpopular opinions and ideas in America.  Blackmail is essentially a form of coercion, and as the history of the 20^th century amply documents, the signature “achievements” of the left during this period were themselves monumental feats of coercion – Stalin’s forced collectivization of the Russian peasants in the 1930s, the  post-WWII Sovietization of central and eastern Europe, Mao’s Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.  Many other examples, of course, could be listed.     

Blackmail has worked well for the left in the U.S. and it is perhaps worthwhile to consider an historical definition of the word in order to get a good sense of how well the left has used it to make a mockery of its unending raptures for “diversity” and to impose a mindless ideological conformity centered on victim groups and their grievances.

Blackmail: “a tribute anciently exacted on the Scottish border by plundering chiefs in exchange for immunity from pillage.”

“Plundering chiefs” actually wonderfully describes the race-careerists like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, professional blackmailers, if you will. The tribute they exact is simply the fear and attention from white leaders that affirms their self-proclaimed status as “black leaders and spokesmen” and the leverage that comes with it to enforce their various demands – reparations, punishment for the failings in sensitivity, employment for “professionals” to monitor the “progress” that never comes. The immunity they offer is a temporary suspension of their accusations and threats if the submission they demand is sufficiently self-effacing and the compliance is unquestioning and complete.  Sharpton’s forte is riot fomenting. He needs to be soothed and accommodated lest mobs hit the streets.  Hillary Clinton when running for the Senate in New York arranged to meet with and kiss Sharpton’s ring, paying tribute, of course, in exchange for votes.

 (http://www.crimelynx.com/hillsharp.html)

More recently, Presidential candidate Martin O’Malley in order to appease the sensitivity police chiefs had to grovel and beg for forgiveness for his outrageous remark, “All lives matter,” betraying an insensitivity typically afflicting white politicians. “I meant no disrespect,” O'Malley said in an interview on This Week in Blackness, a digital show. “That was a mistake on my part and I meant no disrespect. I did not mean to be insensitive in any way or communicate that I did not understand the tremendous passion, commitment and feeling and depth of feeling that all of us should be attaching to this issue.”

(http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/18/politics/martin-omalley-all-lives-matter/)

Was he sufficiently contrite?  Did he really understand this depth of feeling that “all of us should attach to this issue”? Yes, all of us, of course.  Only the plundering chiefs are qualified to judge and they are not to be rushed.

O’Malley’s apology is all too typical and to get a sense of where things are headed with this kind of disgusting pandering and pathetic caving to the bullying ideologues one should contemplate the rituals of “self-criticism” in places like Mao’s China, and Stalin’s Russia where an “official” template for the interpretation of any matter of significance set the parameters for discussion. The words, the tone, the phrasing, all were rigorously circumscribed. Deviation could be quickly and easily detected and would lead to a range of sanctions.      

The plundering chiefs now abound in the universities.  They occupy positions suitably embellished with lofty titles such as Dean of Equity and Inclusion and Vice President for Diversity and Multiculturalism.  They represent and speak for the “under-presented”.  The tribute they exact, beyond the installation in their own positions as exalted, well-compensated commissars with an ample assemblage of staff that reflects the gravitas of their mission, is a considerable power to monitor the speech and behavior of the students and the employees of the universities.  They set the highest standards for sensitivity, the observance of which requires lectures, workshops, videos, training sessions and penalties for infractions.  At the University of California as instructed by President Shalala in her recently promulgated Tool: Recognizing Microaggressions and the Messages They Send, one is forbidden the “Use of the pronoun ‘he’ to refer to all people” because it sends the message that “Male experience is universal.” Any unruly, independent-minded professor can without too much worry blow off the complaints of a dean, provost or even a university president, but when summoned by a Diversity and Equity Commissar, he will soon discover within a depth of respect and a submissive posture he never knew he possessed.    

Difficult as this may be to believe, in 1966 George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder and head of the American Nazi Party was invited to speak at Brown University by the “Open Minds Forum.” That is correct. It is not a misprint.  Rockwell also came to Michigan State University in 1967 to speak. The student who introduced Rockwell to an audience that actually quietly listened to Rockwell had this to say:

 “It is our belief that hatred is best exposed so that all may see it and all may examine its patterns and its capabilities.  It is an issue that today we must struggle to overcome. It is through an understanding hatred in others that we can overcome it within ourselves. We are a society of laws and constitutional guarantees which ought to protect and preserve that which we abhor. Yet the laws in the end will stand to protect us against tyranny and subjection.  It is my hope that our audience this afternoon will recognize and respect the constitutional guarantees given to all the citizens of this nation.  There are those who wish to destroy our lives by forcing our citizens to respond according to the methods they prescribe. This we must avoid. This man’s organization thrives on riots and other overt reactions.  Because his philosophy embodies the  emotion of hatred, do give him the satisfaction of returned hate. For this is what he is seeking.” (Strong applause)

 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfDgZ7mSRyk)

These are thoughts from a time long ago and a place far way. That was then and this is now.  Then, such was the high value attached to free speech and the willingness to be exposed to the widest range of opinions and perspectives that a real live Nazi could actually visit and speak uninterrupted on an American university campus.  Now, sensitivity reigns and the only speakers admitted to ivy halls are those who will not offend, the ideologically safe ones who emit words of support and comfort. For prospective speakers to our institutions of higher learning and open inquiry, they must fit within the prim and proper confines of the narrowest range of ideological conformity.

On the fringe and outside the range of acceptability now are not Nazis and the like who once could come and go, but people like former Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, who had to withdraw from her speaking engagement at Rutgers University last year because of threatened disruption. How pathetic and depressing is this state of affairs and what does it portend?