Introduction to Dossier "Bus Line O" on the Road to Nowhere

It started with the evil Neocons' influence on the Bush I Administration and their policy after 9/11 to start 'exporting' democracy as a strategy in the fight against terrorism. After all, it's not democracies that produce violence, but despotic collectives to whom terror and coercion is part of the doctrine.

It must have taken an extraordinary amount of courage. This strategy is in fact what "the war in Iraq" was all about: liberating the country from Saddam's Baathist fascist regime - and the very, very long shot indeed - of establishing a democracy in the heart of the Middle East.

In the long run it paid of as it always does ... at the price of blood, sweat and tears ... no thanks to the weasel white-flag raisers and the terror apologizers all over the Leftist world. But it's historical dividend that may well continue to pay of in many ways in the years to come.

The U-turn in Western public opinion against "egocentric cultural imperialism" has baffled many: how come liberals started jettisoning their hitterto absolute belief in democratic principles, women's rights, human rights, gay rights, equal rights, civil rights? Leftist intellectuals started issuing pamphlets to the effect that democracy is "actually very much overrated"; Feminists began to campaign for their Muslim sisters' "right to wear the hijab" and other baffling inconsistencies to boot.

Watch the latest shock and awe in PJTV's "InstaVision: Is Freedom Blossoming in the Middle East?", an interview of InstaPundit Glenn Reynolds with Joshua Muravchik, author of "The Next Founders, Voices of Democracy in the Middle East".

At first it looked like perhaps another accident of the dialectic, caused by the Left's habitual and often irrational embrace of the diametrically opposite position of the opponent, no matter if - as a result - you have to start supporting something totally outrageous (like the oppression of the oppressed)! As it turned out, in the final analysis it was something much more interesting than that.

The long and short of it was, the Left's moral compass had just made an inexplicable U-turn. Present blogger embarked on a fascinating quest involving ideological archeology and in the end found that on the philosophical level the Left's about turn was not as erratic as it looked at first glance.

A more accurate description of the postmodern Left - which includes many feminists, legions of environmentalists and 'identity' theorists, hosts of Third-World'ers, New Agers, Luddites and other fruit cakes - would really be "the Collectivist Left and Right". Like all true socialists, they are the heirs of the Counter-Enlightenment, and not - repeat not -  of the mainstream Enlightenment (Classical Liberalism), or of the Radical Enlightenment (free-thinkers, Deists, naturalists, materialists: hear Pat Condell in "Liberty be Damned" and you'll get a good idea of the difference).

The Counter-Enlightenment (also known as the anti Modernists, or the anti philosophes) was a reactionary movement, that acted on every level against the values of the Enlightenment: averse to reason (i.e. philosophy), against individualism, anti democracy and contra capitalism, more often than not with a phobia for technological advancement and a suspicion and distaste for civilization.

An excerpt from "Pomo's Inside-Out, Upside-Down World of Moral Inversion":

"(...)  commentators express their surprise of postmodernism ending up on a par with Nazi, Fascist or extreme Nationalist ideas, expressing their shock, shock at postmodernist involvement in Nazi scandals, or anti-philosophes suddenly spouting crypto fascist propaganda. Richard Wolin admits that the postmodern assault on reason familiarly rings of the standard European reactionary critique as traditionally expressed by the anti-modernists [Richard Wolin, "The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism", Princeton University Press, 2004, Introduction p. 12]. " Wolin builds a good case, to which results from recent research might also be added. Surprised? Not really. All such malignant forms of state collectivism are reducible to the usual suspects."

Over the last few years it has become quite apparent that the Left, having first usurped and then perverted Liberalism for it's own dark purposes, have now reverted to the original ideology of irrational collectivism at the very opposing end of the philosophical scale. A main tenet of that ideology is cultural relativism, or polylogism as described here. As so many of its toxic ideas, today we know it under an innocent sounding epithet with a corrupt definition: multiculturalism.

The new addition to Politeia Articles, dossier "Bus Line O" chronicles the ideological reversal. There's no need anymore to be surprised or outraged by Obama and his ilk hobnobbing with tyrants and petty potentates, in the process propelling the innocents and the oppressed under his poisonous postmodern bus.

Here's Alfonzo Rachel again and his great satire on the bus theme.

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