Vicious Fools
“The extremity of its evil had passed beyond all struggle into some state which bore a horrible similarity to innocence.” ~ C.S. Lewis, Perelandra
Before the events of October 7, if pressed I might have fallen back on a version of ‘There are decent people on both sides’ of the neverending conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. Since the attack, conflicting narratives make it hard to know the truth from one development to the next. The volume of propaganda is stunning. Faked pictures, faked video, AI: both sides are producing agitprop.
I make no claim to serious knowledge about the region, but one doesn’t have to be a Middle East historian to recognize evil.
Journalists have viewed video footage of the attacks by Hamas. By all accounts the savagery is unlike anything we’ve seen in the modern developed world. There are reports of rape so brutal it broke pelvic bones; babies cut from of the stomachs of pregnant women; babies cooked in ovens. As Douglas Murray, a British journalist and author, said in an interview with Piers Morgan, Hamas were at least as brutal as the Nazis, but the Nazis were ashamed and tried to hide what they did. Hamas “did it with glee,” celebrating and laughing and calling their parents to brag. The death toll was the equivalent of 20,000 British people murdered by terrorists in their own country. For the United States, it is equivalent to more than 100,000 dead.
What has occurred in the West in response to this cruelty is astonishing. In cities across North America, Europe, Australia, and beyond, tens of thousands of people have marched in the streets. They have shouted and chanted and waved flags. The messages? Fuck the Jews. Gas the Jews. Destroy the Jews.
Supporters of Hamas outnumber supporters of Israel on every street. They say they are for Palestinian liberation. A Jewish man died from a brain bleed after a pro-Palestine protester hit him in the head with a bullhorn. Gal Gadot, an Israeli actress, held a viewing of the attack footage at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, and anti-Israel protesters attacked attendees outside the venue.
Pretending this is a movement against occupation of tiny amounts of land, or against a country’s human rights record, is bullshit. Calling Israel a genocidal nation, even if their response to the attacks can be critized, is bullshit. How do I know? Because no one has said ‘Gas the Syrians’ over the Syrian civil war, with more than 300,000 dead. Because no one stormed the White House over China’s treatment of the Uyghurs, or the Islamic State’s treatment of Yazidis.
Anyone who learns of these atrocities of Hamas and says ‘good, they deserved it’ is inhuman. It’s that simple. One cannot applaud it and make any claim to moral righteousness.
Enter the useful vicious idiots.
It is the ‘I punch Nazis’ people of 2019 who are now the ‘Maybe Hitler was right’ people. This is another clue to which side is more deranged. Certain movements are coalescing around this new, trendy cause: climatism, BLM, Antifa, transgenderism, communism, and the pro-abortion movement. ‘Queers for Palestine’ and ‘Climate Justice’ are common sightings at pro-Palestinian protests. The strangest yet is a sign reading, ‘Reproductive Justice Means Free Palestine’. On the surface these are unrelated and even conflicting issues. Mashing them together is idiotic.
Let’s be honest: Americans are sheltered and ignorant. The quality of our eduction is embarrassingly bad. For decades we have been propagandized and programmed by our political elites, our media, our entertainment industry, our teachers and professors. In recent years, even our corporations have joined in.
Generations have been conditioned to hate their own country and turn against their countrymen. It is in fashion now to encourage mass migration expressly to undermine the national culture. It is considered sophisticated to embrace child abuse, and to view pedophilia and now even zoophilia as alternative lifestyle choices. “Whiteness” is an epithet. Skin color is equated with virtue. Entire populations are held accountable for things done hundreds of years before they were born, yet the same accusers will tell Jews to stop using the Holocaust as an excuse.
It is a dangerous game that has been played. And it has worked, perhaps better than hoped. Soft, spoiled, uninformed people of the West—many of them white and “educated”—have been driven mad, and I am not using hyperbole.
They have no idea of hardship. No clue what life is like beyond our shores. To them, the culture they know is the baseline for the world. They dismiss the values of modern civilization without a thought, because they have never seen a world without them. The silly fools have invited doom upon us because they are listless, idle, and benighted.
Ask most of the college-age people at a Palestinian liberation protest what ‘From the River to the Sea’ means. They don’t know. They can’t name the river. Some don’t think the attack by Hamas happened at all. One girl said, “I don’t think they did that, did they?” No idea what is going on, but happy to carry a Palestinian flag.
As James Lindsay has warned for years, the movement-behind-the-movements is Marxism. This has been decades in the making, with social media a new tool the activists of the sixties could only dream of. Technology has made society distant and abstract, creating a scary combination of indoctrination and separation. Science fiction isn't required where psychopathic apathy will do.
I grew up in the post-Vietnam era, certainly the best time to grow up in the 20th or 21st centuries. A long period of relative peace and prosperity made me complacent. I expected it to last. It looks increasingly like my generation may not be spared the worst humanity can deliver.