There is great disbelief in the land -- disbelief that Obama and the rest of the global elites refuse to make the rational, logical connection between Islam and Islamic violence, whether in Syria or Copenhagen.
This "populist" response is the logical, healthy, rational effort to assess facts and draw conclusions, to abandon narratives -- agit prop -- and perhaps even to judge -- Islam is not a religion of peace; it is an existential threat to all we hold dear. This vital practice of judging, however, has been drummed out of our morally relative society, a historical process American Betrayal highlights.
Will the good guys win? Be warned. Our patriotic forbears did not win their struggle to convince the American people of the reality of domestic Communist infiltration and subversion. The same alliance we see today of the Left, the media and the elites was able to obscure and cloud all, seizing reality in the confusion and brutalizing it.
Take the public demonization of the great ex-Communist witnesses Chambers and Bentley, whose claims of Moscow-directed cells operating inside the federal government were true and have been redundantly confirmed. After their testimonies, these heroes of conscience were mocked and smeared, first by Communists, then in the media and elite echo chambers. Question marks remained, coming between our understanding and reality.
To this day, as a society we know more about fantasy "witch hunts" -- smokescreen -- than the reality that a veritable army of secret Communist agents existed to further the ends of Stalin's Kremlin. As a society, we still retain the successfully promoted Big Lie, not the facts of the matter. The same process is underway today: "Islam is a religion of peace," and you're an "Islamophobe" if you say otherwise. Yesterday, Public Enemy No. 1 was the "Red-baiter."
But wait a minute -- weren't the anti-Communists the big bad witch-hunters?
From American Betrayal:
Certainly, that’s the message Americans have had drummed into their heads, Mao’s-Little-Red-Book-style. The more literary text of choice in this case is, of course, Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. Instead of violent Red Guard troops forcing us to live by it, our reeducators were high school teachers who merely assigned us to read it and absorb its lessons. (I had to read the thing in the eighth grade.) For two or three generations, anyway, Arthur Miller’s dramatic re-rendering of congressional efforts to disclose extensive and clandestine Kremlin-directed assaults on our constitutional republic as the irrational and imaginary fetish of “repressed” and “Puritanical” “zealots” in Pilgrim hats was a classroom staple—Silvermaster’s “neurotics” and “exhibitionists” elevated to the realm of theah-tuh. As a 2005 (post-Venona) collection of twentieth-century American drama puts it, “Miller wrote The Crucible in 1953 and it presents a clear parallel between the American anti-Communist paranoia of the period and the 1692 witch trials of Salem, exposing both to be maliciously motivated with ritualistic public denunciations of largely innocent people.”
Largely innocent? I’d like to plop the 650 damning pages of Spies right down in front of the editor that wrote that tripe. What is most breathtaking here, though, is the obdurate endurance of the glaring lie. In fact, a greater intellectual hoax than the Saleming of the Red hunters is beyond imagination. (Islam-is-peace is as great, but no greater.) Unchanged by the hard evidence, the deception continues, as impossible to claw back from the culture at large as a cloud.
This is telling. The great witnesses (Bentley, Chambers, J. B. Matthews, Louis Budenz . . . ), the great investigators (Dies, McCarran, McCarthy . . . ), took their stand to save America from Communist subversion. Whether they realized it—and, for the most part, how could they?—they also took their stand to save the essential base of reality itself: the importance of fact-based narrative; the primacy of “neutral truth”; morality’s need for absolutes. All would dissipate rapidly in society at large following anti-Communism’s demise in American culture. It was the ultimate defeat for the anti-Communist opposition, with their facts and conclusions, their witnesses and their affidavits, their investigations and their implications. This defeat cleared the field for the rise of brand-new waves of subversion: fungible facts, moral relativism, deconstructionism, and other explosive assaults on the rocks of civilizational equilibrium. ...