Guilt by Association: Why the totalitarian left is so offended by it (unless you happen to be asociated with a "right-winger")

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. I.F.Stone

A "new McCarthyism" is seen in the manner in which guilt by association has been pursued by the likes of Glenn Beck and "mainstream" GOP leadership (if there is such a thing). Katrina vanden Heuvel, The Nation

In the United States of America, we don’t practice guilt by association. And let’s remember that just as violence and extremism are not unique to any one faith, the responsibility to oppose ignorance and violence rests with us all. Jeremy Ben Ami, President, JStreet

This is the story of a late-twentieth century invention, namely the ostensible moral and intellectual sin of accusations of "guilt by association."

This trope, "guilt by association," or GbA, has a curious history and a curious present. It has the following characteristics:

1) The trope user is almost invariably a self-described person of the "Left," or, in somewhat more modern usage, a "progressive." The target is someone perceived as, or at least designated as someone opposed to the Left, a "right-winger."

2) The trope has a surface resemblance to accusations of established errors of reasoning -- fallacies -- but in fact it is the user of the trope who is illogical and irrational.

3) The accusation underlying the usage of the trope is as much moral as intellectual; the trope user combines a disdain for the ethics and morality of the target (the ostensible bad faith of so-called right-wing McCarthites, for example) with an accusation of intellectual incompetence (failure to understand elementary logic).

4) The trope enables its users, who are often devoted supporters of totalitarian and other hateful movements, to pose as moral and intellectual superiors.

The totalitarian Left decries "Guilt by association."  And yet, if you remember just a few months ago, after the mass murders committed in Norway by the crazed lone gunman Anders Breivik, they were the same people trying to associate his rampage with Christianity, Israel, and any writer who was critical of extremist Islam.  This is far from being the only example of western totalitarian leftist hypocrisy. In the aftermath of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, people like Noam Chomsky and George Galloway came out immediately blaming not the fanatical expression of a religion with which they have allied themselves, but the United States and the West for having angered the Islamists.

I would encourage everyone to read all of Professor Werner Cohn's fascinating essay HERE.

"Left wing" UK Labour MP and "right wing" writer Peter Hitchens agree on what drove Norwegian Anders Breivik to kill

Peter Hitchens, the author of The Rage Against God and The Abolition of Liberty has identified a much neglected but likely cause of the insane murder spree by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, and it isn't "right wing" commentators in the media.

Labour MP Paul Flynn

Hitchens has an ally in British Labour MP Paul Flynn, who wrote on his website:

"Peter Hitchens is correct. There I have said it. It's today only. We share a view on which we have corresponded in the past. It's a bit of a puzzle to both of us that few others have noticed. About 80% of mass killers were on drugs - usually anti-depressants or anabolic steroids."

Flynn wrote in response to a column by Hitchens (the brother of noted writer Christopher Hitchens) in which he speculated:

Peter Hitchens

"It's the drugs, stupid. In hundreds of square miles of supposed analysis of the Norway mass murder, almost nobody has noticed that the smirking Anders Breivik was taking large quantities of mind-altering chemicals.

In this case, the substances are an anabolic steroid called stanozolol, combined with an amphetamine-like drug called ephedrine, plus caffeine to make the mixture really fizz. I found these facts in Breivik’s vast, drivelling manifesto simply because I was looking for them.

The authorities and most of the media are more interested in his non-existent belief in fundamentalist Christianity. I doubt if the drugs would ever have been known about if Breivik hadn’t himself revealed this. I suspect that mind-bending drugs of some kind feature in almost all of the epidemic rampage killings that Western society is now suffering. "

What drove Breivik to murder over 70 people was likely a combination of factors, from his own personal demons and obsessions to drugs to whatever. His act has brought to light a great danger in Western society. That danger is not the way that unhinged individuals can be motivated by political arguments.

The greatest danger in the wake of the Breivik killings is how neo-Marxist totalitarians and Islamists hope to capitalize on mass-murder by trying to fulfill their goal of restricting the expression of ideas with which they disagree.


Not really related..
Norway's Crown Prince Haakon bears an uncanny resemblance to evil General Zod

Crown Prince Haakon of Norway

General Zod of Krypton (with accomplices)

Why are socialist moral relativists silent in the wake of the Norwegian terrorist attack?

After the al-Qaida bombings on 9/11, moral relativists like Noam Chomsky rushed to condemn, not the perpetrators of that horrific atrocity, but the United States of America, for ostensibly having done something to anger the terrorists enough to murder 2977 innocent people.

Rather than outright condemnation of the perpetrators of this abominable mass murder, Chomsky, on the very next day, before the bodies of the victims of Jihadi terror were cold, wrote:

"we can seek to understand what may have led to the crimes, which means making an effort to enter the minds of the likely perpetrators. If we choose the latter course, we can do no better, I think, than to listen to the words of Robert Fisk, whose direct knowledge and insight into affairs of the region is unmatched after many years of distinguished reporting. Describing "The wickedness and awesome cruelty of a crushed and humiliated people," he writes that "this is not the war of democracy versus terror that the world will be asked to believe in the coming days. It is also about American missiles smashing into Palestinian homes and US helicopters firing missiles into a Lebanese ambulance in 1996 and American shells crashing into a village called Qana and about a Lebanese militia - paid and uniformed by America's Israeli ally - hacking and raping and murdering their way through refugee camps." And much more.

Again, we have a choice: we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead."

Chomsky was not alone is his morally relativistic justification of Jihad, or even worse, those like Robert Fisk, Richard Falk, Michael Keefer and a cast of irrational or malevolent anti-Capitalists and Jihad apologists who, like Holocaust deniers, strove to deny, and this defend the real perpetrators of the crime against humanity that was committed on September 11, 2001. In some cases, the 9-11 terrorists were even celebrated as heroes, as they were by throngs of Palestinians.

Now that an insane terrorist has murdered dozens of innocent people at a government building and a socialist youth indoctrination camp in Norway, no conservative or Christian of note has come forward to attempt to justify or attempt to mitigate or deflect blame from the depravity of Anders Behring Breivik.

Nor will they. Breivik is a terrorist and mass-murderer for whom there is no justification.

But it is interesting to observe that no anti-capitalist or socialist commentator who was so quick to find a moral justification for 9-11 has not leaped to assuage Breivik's crimes. The question is not why they should do so, for no decent human being possibly could. The question is why they are so anxious to defend and enable the murderers of innocents in the West when the murders are committed in the name of Jihad.

UPDATE: It didn't take long for the crazies to come out of the woodwork. Khaled Muammar, who until earlier this month was president of the Canadian Arab Federation, which was defunded by the federal government for expressing support for terrorist groups, is spreading anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. This one by conspiracy whack-job Stephen Lendman, who says the Breivik killings were a Mossad plot. Lendman is at least consistently crazy. He also says that Bobby Kennedy was killed by the CIA.

(Update h/t Blazing Cat Fur)

Norwegian Killer Breivik's Knights Templar Obsession

As more news and even more speculation about Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Behring Breivik comes to light, his motives are being ascribed, variously, to Christian fundamentalism and white supremacism.

A YouTube video that Breivik created points to neither of those traits, but does strongly indicate cultural conservatism along with his hatred of Islam, Marxism, and multiculturalism.

While some accounts point to his membership in the Freemasons, one aspect of his apparent influences that has been discussed less is his obvious obsession with the Order of the Knights Templar.

The Templars were an Order of Priest/Knights who were one of the most effective military forces in the Crusades and who also created an economic infrastructure within Europe that became a forerunner of modern banking.

It was the wealth that they created that led to their undoing when Philip IV of France forced Pope Clement to dissolve the order and execute all the Templars so he could absorb their wealth. Legends of surviving Templars have existed for centuries and their continuation within the Order of Freemasons (which has its own, very separate origins from the Templars)  has been the source of conspiracy theories and popular fiction.

The Templars were famous for interacting with other cultures and learning from them and much is made of the mystical nature of the Order. Umberto Eco, the author of The Name of the Rose, wrote a Templar conspiracy novel in 1988 called Foucault's Pendulum about a secret order of modern-day Templars bent on world domination. The novel was interesting in that it was based on the plot being advanced through the Internet, which at the time was only available to relatively few people.

Breivik's YouTube video, titled Knights Templar 2083 includes numerous depictions of Templars and concludes with a now chilling photograph of the killer holding a weapon, clearly stylized to make him look like a continuation of the Order's tradition.

Out of the flow of information and rumour that will come as Breivik's life and judicial process is further revealed, it seems likely that wild conspiracy theories involving a long-dead Crusader Order will be part of them.