April 29, 2010
They Don't Have to Silence Us if We Silence Ourselves First
Daniel Greenfield
What is a free country? Is it a country that is free of being ruled by any other country, or is it a country of free people who are not afraid. The truth is that no country can be free, unless its people are free. Not freedom as embodied in legal documents or stirring anthems, which nearly every country has, but free in their minds. Unafraid to believe, to speak and to live.
Tyranny isn't a man holding a gun to your head and telling you what to do. Tyranny is when you do what you're told because you're holding the gun to your own head. And then you have become a collaborator in your own oppression. It is possible to be enslaved without ever becoming a slave. And sadly, it is sadly for people to act like slaves without any chains being anywhere in sight.
No regime, no ideology and no power can maintain absolute physical control of all the people all of the time. To rule, they need to control not their bodies, but their minds and their souls. Tyranny wants loyalty but it will settle for fear. And fear, once internalized, destroys moral courage and replaces it with moral cowardice, eroding the strength of beliefs and ideas with the poisonous liquid of dread. The individual becomes an agent for the forces of tyranny, warning himself against any action that could get him into trouble. And then he is finally a slave.
In Stockholm Syndrome, hostages try to take control of their powerlessness by identifying with their captors. Under tyranny, entire populations can suffer from Stockholm Syndrome, paying devoted obeisance to the tyrants who murdered them in numberless amounts because once oppression is internalized, it comes to seem like a benediction. The mind-forged slave embraces his chains as a moral good, clings to them as an expression of all that is right and sensible in the world. He will even die for them because to a slave, freedom is more terrifying than death.
Recently, we rediscovered the simple fact that even on cable television, on a network where anything goes, one thing does not go: Depicting Mohammed, even in a bear suit. That same iron law has been unofficially passed in country after country, where operas, newspapers, books, television programs have been censored in order to avoid offending the people who might kill them, if they were not censored. Speech and image have been blocked, cut out, snipped and silenced – not because anyone has actually been killed, but because attempts have made to kill some people, which is enough to make free speech go the way of the dodo.
And that is exactly the point. They don't have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first. They don't have to oppress us if we oppress ourselves first. They don't have to demand our surrender and submission, if we surrender and submit first. Islam, we love it. Sharia law, we'll gladly adopt it. Free speech, it has to have its limits. Women's rights, we'll have to walk a fine line. Freedom. Ha, what freedom. We've already traded that away for a nice set of multicultural bongos, a few curry shops, a glass of arrack and a leatherbound copy of the Koran.
A free country is not one that nickel and dimes its birthright of freedom like a 10-year-old begging his parents to extend his curfew. It is a country whose people uncompromisingly refuse to surrender their freedoms, in the face of tyranny, torture and death, in the face of armies, tanks, secret police and all the forces of the world arrayed against them. A country that compromises on its freedom is no longer free. It will know fear. It will know terror. It will be oppressed, and there will be no relief from that oppression, until they choose freedom over tyranny once again.
Fear is a reflex. Tyranny thrives on it, imbues it and feeds it. It kills randomly in order to spread that terror further to create populations who never know when their day will come; when the suicide bomber, the black van, the sword and the secret police will come for them. Men will fight and die for freedom on the battlefield, but the struggle to remain defiant in a society where everyone is afraid all the time is a much harder fight. Yet overcoming that reflex to find safety by surrendering and collaborating, by learning to love Big Brother and embracing his ideals, is what it takes to be a free citizen of a free nation.
Pavlov, the formulator of the Pavlov Reflex, knew quite a lot about conditioning. His own experiments showed that fear could be conditioned by the ringing of a bell. Perhaps those insights were what enabled Pavlov to go on defying the Soviet Union for decades. At a time when most scientists and researchers were terrified out of their minds at a slip, a wrong word that might send them to a long death in the basements of the Lubyanka or an even longer death in the Gulags, Pavlov would ride buses and lecture the passengers on the fascism of the Soviet regime. And while those scientists eventually ended up in the Gulags themselves, Pavlov died a natural death.
Where so many Russians had become conditioned to hear the ringing of the bell everywhere, and to search for it when they didn't, to be afraid all the time, and to love the thing they feared in order to have some measure of security, Pavlov understood the reflex and rejected it. He chose to be a free man instead. Freedom comes from standing up to evil, from confronting it and defying it –not from submitting to it and collaborating with it, from silencing yourself in the hope that you will no longer be afraid when the bell rings.
Today the bell is Islam. The bell is Mohammed; that two -headed religion with its two faces, the Religion of Peace and the Religion of Death. If you focus hard enough on it as the Religion of Peace, perhaps you won't notice the grinning skull on its other side. And so the bell rings, and the poodles run to their master, licking his hands and showering him with adoration. Oh yes, Islam is a wonderful religion. It has so many human rights. Truly it is a paragon for us today. If only we could be as free as Muslims. If only.
And what is the source of Islam's power? Comedy Central reminds us of that again. Its power is simple enough. Its followers are more willing to kill those who resist, than those who are not its followers are willing to resist them.
No military victory. No superior technology. Not even sheer numbers, as there is still no First World country in which Muslims have officially become a majority. Their power comes from fear. From being prepared to murder anyone who disagrees with them until the mere threat alone, from a worthless source, is enough to badly panic a multibillion dollar corporation – the same corporation that would never take protests from Jews or Christians seriously caves when a single Muslim on a previously obscure website threatens a beheading. What is the difference? The difference is murder. Muslims murder people who offend them. And having gained a reputation for that, they are quickly parlaying it into practical political power.
A nation's police, legal and military divisions are entirely useless if they cannot protect the exercise of such basic freedoms. Without it, they become nothing more than glorified social service centers that enforce the law only when it isn't too dangerous for them, when it won't offend the wrong people – the wrong people being those who kill on casual provocation. And such a country, though it may have documents to its name attesting its freedoms, and endless ranks of judiciary appointees and professors debating those freedoms-- they mean nothing if the people cannot actually exercise those freedoms.
The Bush administration's War on Terror did not actually put an end to fear of Islamic terrorism, instead it fed it with endless alerts and prolonged battles thousands of miles away, while in the heart of civilization, terror remained emboldened enough to wave its green scimitar decorated flag. That is why the assault on Salman Rushdie was in some ways a more significant strategic blow than 9/11. On 9/11 thousands of our fellow Americans died. But when we surrender to Islamic terror and intimidation, our freedom dies. For everyone. And the bell begins to ring.
Only by defying Islam, can we begin the process of taking back our freedoms. Only by speaking out, do our voices matter. Because they don't have to silence us, if we silence ourselves first.
I couldn't agree with you more. Here in Canada I have found people afraid to even talk about Jesus for fear of the 'so called authorities'. I, as you, believe that one must stand and speak for the TRUTH no matter where you are. Stand up (peacefully) for our freedoms before we have no freedoms other than what is dictated to us by our 'governments'.
May God Bless and protect the people that are taking a stand for the things that are right like Americans asking their Gov't to keep the Constituition and not try to change it to fit their own agenda.
God Bless and protect you..
Gramma from Canada
posted by: Gramma from Canada
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 12:26 AM
The West, even just America at this point, must come to the recognition of the reality of Islam. We can't expect comedians, authors, others, to willingly give their lives, to literally be killed, to cease existing in this world, just because they refused to silence themselves over the topics of Islam or Muhammad. The problem is our entire country, our civilization, allowing Islam into our midst in the first place. As long as Islam exists in the West people will have to stay self-censor if they want to live. The loss of freedom doesn't occur when various individuals make the rational choice to choose to continue living, the loss of freedom occurs when a free society allows Islam into their midst. We cannot allow Islam to spread in the West, it will absolutely, most assuredly, with 100% certainty, destroy our freedoms, and eventually our entire civilization.
Given how modern liberalism has perverted education, religion, politics, culture, it would be nearly impossible at this point for the West, full of citizens who are ignorant of the true nature and history of Islam, ignorant of their own true history, to ever get to the point that they acknowledge the danger of allowing Islam in the West and move to restrict it. The restriction should be that Islam is a political ideology not a religion entitled to typical freedom of religion rights in the West.
Given that the modern liberal West will never restrict Islam (even though it only began spreading here in the 1960s) the fate of the West is sealed. All of the arguing over cartoons being censored or articles not being written is merely shifting the chairs around on the Titanic. It is meaningless fluff meant to distract from the ultimately reality of the situation.
There may be the smallest possibility that incidents such as these will wake people up in time to save the West but it is most likely far too late. Each incident will be reacted to as a distinct incident of cowardice on the part of the individual or group involved. The larger society will never act to eliminate the threat in the first place, at that is where the true cowardice lies.
posted by: Interested
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 01:00 PM
I'm currently pre-illustrating some Bukhari Hadiths.
(The finished illustrations being in colour...)
I am illustrating them not in a particularly insulting way, but rather in an accurate way. The hadiths provide extensive details!
The 'prophet' had head lice, and used to rely on some women to pick at the lice.
I can illustrate this without even showing his face. ;)
It's only the Bukhari Hadith written on the bottom of the illustration that pinpoints what exactly is going on.
"Oh, they're NOT showering the 'prophet' with affection and love. Head lice, eh? OH."
Mohammed's call to kill salamanders/geckos? *check*
(Apparently, the geckos/salamanders used their fat, smiling faces to stoke the flames of Abraham....)
Aisha's recount of how the prophet used to leave for prayer with visible water spots on his clothes (ie: from her wiping fresh semen stains...blegh). *check*
The Bukhari books are teeming with ridiculous stories about muhammud.
The hardest part is deciding which ridiculous stories to illustrate. ;)
posted by: Atheist Joe from T.O.
Thursday, April 29, 2010 at 04:13 PM
I believe Mohammed stole his material from earlier sources. Allah is simply a production of Mohammed's mind. Most of the Quran was stolen from older sources. If any Muslim has a problem with that then I don't care. Why should I care? The Quran says that all non-muslims (infidels) are morally inferior. The Nazi's had a similar idea about the "Untermensch". Islam is despicable.
posted by: Farlowe
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 02:42 AM
On another website's comment page I said: any religion is one in which the god is not of this earth.
Islam and Latter Day Saints are two ideologies that were begun by humans, not by a spiritual being.
Christianity was begun by Jesus Christ, who was actually the son of God and God himself. The Jews worship the same God, although they won't admit that.
So, muslims "religion" is not a religion at all. Their koran is basically a "treatise" on fear and death upon "non-believers".
posted by: marineseabee
Friday, April 30, 2010 at 04:50 AM
While Mormonism may have been founded by a man ALL other comparisons to Islam beyond that fail. Muhammad rejected Christ, broke all of the Ten Commandments, rejected vast portions of the Bible, OT and NT, stole, raped, killed, lied, etc.
And judging from the fruits of the two religions, Mormons are usually the best people, productive to society, industrious, never a threat to anyone, etc. As to Islam, well take a look at the world and see the fruits of Islam. Islam destroys and enslaves more than it does anything else. It has been the biggest blight on the world in the past millennium.
Say what you will about Joseph Smith and the religion he founded, any comparisons to Muhammad or Islam are a complete smear.
posted by: Interested
Saturday, May 1, 2010 at 05:49 PM
