Both are attempting to create utopias in order to redeem past sins both permit no dissent from the one revealed truth both demonize and seek to suppress their opponents both project their own bad behavior onto others both are consumed by paranoid conspiracy theories.
The correspondences between Western progressives and Islamists are really quite remarkable. Faced with an enemy that has declared war upon reason, the West has left the citadel undefended. From manmade global warming to Israel, from Iraq to the origin of the universe, the West has replaced truth with ideology. The disconcerting fact, as we have seen in the preceding pages, is that the West has been doing precisely the same thing. In the Islamist onslaught upon the free world, the West is confronting an ideology that hijacks evidence and distorts and falsifies it for its own ends. Meanwhile, as a contribution to our current debates, here is the last section of the book’s last chapter. You can obtain the book from Amazon here and here. I also argued that the onslaught upon Israel and the Jewish people could only be properly understood as an integral part of that broader western existential crisis.
In that book, I argued that all these developments were the result of a profound cultural, moral and spiritual sickness in the west which had substituted numerous ideologies for its bedrock values and had thus replaced truth and reason by the abuse of power. In today’s debates, I hear in particular many echoes of what I wrote in my 2010 book The World Turned Upside Down: the Global Battle over God, Truth and Power. I’m pleased that others are now finally discussing them. I have been writing about all these things for many years. In our current fevered times, there is much anxious discussion about the west’s all-too obvious existential crisis – the erosion of its fundamental moral and cultural values its repudiation of national identity and attachment its consequent embrace of mass immigration and Islamisation the hollowing out of conservatism and the eruption of shameless antisemitism.
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