Confronting Islam, or Not . . . Part I

The Evil Empire

We have recently been reading a series of essays, entitled Fighting the Ideological War.  The overarching focus is upon the West's need to fight Islam ideologically.  Several of the essays argue that the West has failed miserably to this point, firstly to see Islam as an ideology, and, secondly, to combat it at the ideological level.  One essay draws parallels with the Cold War.  It reads like a comic opera.  [John H. Moore, "Ideology and Central Planning: Lessons from the Cold War", Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies From Communism to Islamism, edited by Katharine Cornell Gorka and Patrick Sookhdeo (McLean, Va: The Westminster Institute/Isaac Publishing, 2012.] 

Moore points out that in the 1950's and 1960's the overwhelming consensus amongst credentialed academics was that the Soviet Union had a superior economic model and philosophy to the West.  Socialism was succeeding in making the Soviet Union economically wealthy, whilst the West was being overtaken in almost every sphere.  The Soviets were inevitably going to dominate the world.  The Commentariat believed that this would be the outcome because socialism was an inherently better system than capitalism.  In other words, as the Cold War progressed the establishment in the US, both in and out of government, in the media, and in academia had already capitulated. 

It all turned out to be untrue.
  But the debate over Soviet ideology did not really emerge until the seventies.  Eventually the US and the West began to combat the Soviet Union not just militarily, but ideologically.  The core proposition was that free markets, private property, economic and political freedom actually produce better outcomes for mankind over the longer term than centralised, authoritarian/totalitarian central planning.   Slowly and eventually the Commentariat in the US actually came to believe it. 

The Soviets, for their part, always believed the conflict was fundamentally ideological.  The fact that the West failed to confront them at that level was taken as a sign of weakness, internal doubt, confusion, and cowardice.  It confirmed to Soviets their belief in the inevitable progress of history towards a Marxist Leninist world. 

Western silence and self-censorship, of course, were seen by the peoples of the Soviet empire as  a sign of weakness in the face of Soviet power.  If the American President was too frightened to tell the full truth about Soviet human rights violations at home and Soviet aggression, espionage and subversion abroad, if he was too "prudent" in his management of East-West relations that he could not counter the lies of Soviet disinformation and propaganda with plain truth, then how could the peoples of the Soviet empire even contemplate telling the truth, even about the smallest things?  (John Lenczowski, "Political-Ideological Warfare in Integrated Strategy, and its Basis in an Assessment of Soviet Reality", Gorka, op cit., p. 104f.)

Two individuals, more than any others, took the lead in calling out the Soviet Union morally and ideologically.  These two were President Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II.  These two, each in the sphere of their own  responsibilities and offices determined that they would call out totalitarian oppression for what it was: an embodiment of evil. 

Reagan was the first political leader to use the moral vocabulary of "evil" to describe the Soviet empire in the recent era.  The reaction was hysterical.  How reckless could Reagan be?  Yet the President calmly responded that he wanted them, the Soviets, to know that he knew.  This acknowledgement inspired great hope behind the Iron Curtain.  The, finally, the Soviets used the term about themselves.  Once the proper vocabulary was employed, it was over.  Semantic unanimity brought the end not in the much-feared bang, but in a whimper.  Truth turned out to be the most effective weapon in the Cold War.  Truth set free the imprisoned peoples of the evil empire.  (Ibid., p. 153.)

This may seem fanciful to many in the West, now morally jaded and radically post-modern.  Talking in categories that invoke truth, evil, righteousness, and lies belongs to a faded, failed epistemology.  Nobody talks like that any more. To talk in those categories and in a moral conceptual frame invites self-criticism, self-examination before rules, standards, and ethics that lie outside of oneself and to which one is held accountable.  It is to identify oneself to one degree or another as sinful. Magically, when that happens evil attenuates. 

Whilst Reagan's rhetoric created conniptions amongst the effete elites, it rang true within the Soviet Union.  They knew the truth.  They knew they had been telling themselves a lie for seventy years.  They despised the West because the West could not see it, let alone declare it.  John Lenczowski describes the day when this first dawned upon him. 

I vividly remember the day in 1990 when I read a statement in the Soviet Press by Alexander Yakovlev, the Politburo chief of Soviet ideology, that he had come to understand that Leninism was based upon class struggle and hatred, and that this was "evil".  The chief of Soviet ideology had used the exact same words to describe the Soviet system as had President Ronald Reagan.  Excitedly, I faxed his remark around Washington.  Yakovlev's words meant the end of the Cold War and the Soviet empire.  The actual deeds of its dissolution soon came in their wake.  Words and the restoration of their relationship to reality were critical to the Communist collapse.  This was no small thing since, for many in the West, words had lost their meaning.  (Ibid., p. 151f.  Emphasis, ours.)

In Part II, we will fast forward to the present day, to evaluate the West's ideological response, or the lack thereof, to Islam.  It is every bit as bad as the thirty years of failure to respond properly to the Soviet Union: that is, ethically, morally, ideologically, and religiously.  Actually, it is worse because the rebellion against, and retreat from, the historic Christian faith has become a full scale rout.  If the West struggled to find an ideological framework out of which to confront the evil of totalitarian communism then, it operates in an ideological vacuum of even more pronounced relativism now.