CHAPTER TWELVE

We can see that all elements of the socialist ideal—the abolition of private property, family, hierarchies, the hostility toward religion—could be regarded as manifestations of one basic principle: the suppression of individuality … the destruction of individuality, or, at least, its suppression to a point where it would cease to be a social force.

—IGOR SHAFAREVICH1

The ultimate objective of the new policy is not to learn more secrets about the adversary, and not even to teach the masses in the West in the spirit of Marxism-Leninist ideology, but to slowly replace the free-market capitalist society, with its individual freedoms in economic and socio-political spheres of life, with a carbon copy of the “most progressive” system, and eventually merge into one world-wide system ruled by a benevolent bureaucracy which they call Socialism (or Communism, as the final and supreme stage of this “progress”).

To effect this change, it is much easier … to change the perceptions of reality, attitudes, patterns of behavior and to create wide-spread demands and expectations, leading ultimately to the acceptance of totalitarianism.

—TOMAS SCHUMAN (A.K.A. YURI BESMENOV)2

There was a moment of silence while this, as it turned out, all too exact prophesy sank in, and then the previous conversation resumed.

—HIPPOLYTE TAINE AS RELATED BY MALCOLM MUGGERIDGE3

The funny thing about this book—if there is a funny thing about this book—is that in setting out to explore the breaches in those bastions of tradition (assumed to be manned by conservatives) that became apparent as the Western world struggled with an expanding, flexing, and combusting Islam, I expected to focus mainly on the disconnect between facts and conclusions about Islam—not Communism. Communism, it seemed, was an erstwhile threat, supposedly vanquished decades ago. Then the past eleven chapters took shape.

Meanwhile, I continued to write my syndicated newspaper column, amassing a body of work supplemented by blog essays, which, since 9/11, amounts to an almost uninterrupted chronicle of Islam’s fearsome impact on the Western mind—the place where denial and delusion insert themselves between fact and conclusion. I have tracked this phenomenon through the culture, where sharia norms (Islamic law) are increasingly deferred to (to avert violence), in politics, where liberty shrinks to maintain an increasingly sharia-compliant order (to avert violence), and in the military, where sharia-based demands for “respect” (submission) drive military strategy, also to avert violence. It wasn’t very long after 9/11 that it became apparent that, like true dhimmi, we were “submitting” to Islam’s cult of supremacy as a by-product of our own cultural devolution into childishness by choice.4

Of course, first I had to learn what dhimmi were. The Arabic term refers to Christians and Jews, who, conquered by Islam, live suppressed and diminished lives according to the strictures of sharia. These laws enforce the Koranic command that dhimmi “feel themselves subdued” (sura 9:29). The miserable history of the dhimmi is the single most relevant aspect of Islam to anyone who is not Muslim. Why? Even in those parts of the world culturally and religiously separate from Islam, the paradigm of the dhimmi not only defines Islamic attitudes toward “infidels,” it also prefigures the “infidel” response to Islam.

This relationship turns on what may be the oldest mind game in history. As populations come under the pressure of Islamic immigration—a “phenomenon of conquest through immigration called al-Hijra,” as the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders puts it5—they also come under the pressure of Islamic grievances and demands, always accompanied by the threat or reality of violence.6 This constitutes a period of previolent jihad (broken by outbursts of violence), in which passive-aggressive Islam is able to trigger in non-Islamic populations the apology reflex, the accommodation reflex, the appeasement reflex, and finally the roll-over-and-play-dead reflex, all of which permit Islam’s advance. Full-blown violent jihad ensues as necessary. Whether official dhimmi status follows, what historian Bat Ye’or calls “dhimmitude” deepens, as when, for example, a university in Britain—through whose unsurpassed literary tradition run veritable rivers of mead, ale, and whisky—considers closing campus bars due to the minority Muslim view of alcohol as “immoral.”7 This dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or discovered, is a cultural, mental, and spiritual condition visible in all nations and peoples contending with Islam through history, recognizable by markers of supplication, self-abnegation, and, most tellingly, fear—and, most relevantly, silence. Again, such dhimmitude can (and does) mark societies that are ostensibly non-Islamic.

Or is that pre-Islamic?

I was lucky to learn about dhimmitude early in this latest cycle of global jihad. My education began when, along with a Koran, I picked up a copy of Ibn Warraq’s essential Why I Am Not a Muslim (1995) at a local bookstore outside New York City on September 12, 2001. A few months later, at the beginning of 2002, in response to a column I had written puzzling through a C-SPAN panel discussion of Islam, which was part double talk (from Islamic clerics) and part fact-based logic (from Christian ministers), Andrew G. Bostom, a medical professor at Brown University, wrote to ask whether he could send me a collection of books by Bat Ye’or. He was finding that her historical research into jihad and dhimmitude was filling in the blanks on our contemporary quandaries.

Well, why not? He kindly sent several books my way: The Dhimmi, The Decline of Eastern Christianity and Islam and Dhimmitude, all keys from the exotic, distant past to understanding our postmodern plight. Bostom had come upon Bat Ye’or’s works shortly after 9/11, a time when some among us were beginning to realize that what we were all hearing 24/7 on cable, on NPR, in The New York Times, from all the experts—John Esposito, Karen Armstrong, Juan Cole, ex-ambassadors to Saudi Arabia and the like—was out of sync with what we were watching before our eyes. In other words, the narrative—“Islam is peace”—was not supported by the evidence: Islam is violence. Islam is slavery (Sudan). Islam is forced conversion (Egypt). Islam is child rape (Iran, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, South Yorkshire, too). Islam is pillage (Somalia). Islam is religious cleansing (Iraq). Islam is death for apostasy (Swat Valley, Harvard University, too8). Islam is censorship (everywhere). Islam is conquest (Cyprus, Israel, Kosovo, Philippines, the 751 government-ID’d no-go zones of France9). Such fact-based observations, of course, trigger charges of that sin of sins—“Islamophobia” (“racism” being its domestic twin)—but does mere name-calling (“Islamophobe”) make these serious crimes and their real victims go away?

In our world, yes. Over nearly a century of Big Lies we have learned to discount fact and disable logic. As in a frustration dream, the crimes, the victims, and their suffering vanish in today’s magic word, “Islamophobia.” What remains—slanderous allegations of “prejudice,” permanent brands of “bias”—triggers the revulsion reflex in the postmodern brain, still programmed to be vigilant against racism, lynch mobs, the KKK, and the like. Extant or not, functional or not, these usually faux stimuli create outrage Islam exploits as “Islamophobia.” Have you left no sense of decency?

This pattern is very old. In pre-McCarthy times, the all-powerful word that stopped the logic process cold was “Red-baiter.” In 1938, J. B. Matthews, a truth teller who would later work for Senator McCarthy and would himself be publicly neutralized (slimed) for this same “crime,” described “Red-baiting” as “the best trick ever invented, short of a firing squad, for making short work of anybody who dares to object to communist theories and practices. If he is not effectively silenced, he is at least thoroughly discredited among the vast flock of citizens who enjoy thinking of themselves as liberals.”10

Substitute “Islamophobia” for “Red-baiting” and the statement describes the fail-safe technique that has kept the facts of jihad—the consequences of jihad—under official wraps since 9/11, silencing and discrediting anybody who dares object to Islamic “theories and practices.” Instead, we must ponder: “Why do they hate us?” This was the question public figures, the commentariat, the academy, even the birds in the trees called out to one another in those weeks and months as the battleground carnage in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania cooled and was sorted. This was no mystery that reading about the hate for the “Other” codified in the Koran couldn’t have readily solved, but experts by-passed the answer, many of them already deep into what Bertrand Russell might have called “the conspiracy of concealment,” his 1920 phrase for the lies Western visitors to newly Bolshevik Russia considered necessary to make the nascent police state appear civilized in the eyes of the outside world.11 At the same time, Russell made a memorable comparison between what was then exhausted Islam and high-riding Bolshevism.

Bolshevism combines the characteristics of the French Revolution with those of the rise of Islam … Marx has taught that Communism is fatally predestined to come about; this produces a state of mind not unlike that of the early successors of Mahommet … Among religions, Bolshevism is to be reckoned with Mohammedanism rather than with Christianity and Buddhism. Christianity and Buddhism are primarily personal religions, with mystical doctrines and a love of contemplation. Mohammedanism and Bolshevism are practical, social, unspiritual, concerned to win the empire of this world.12

Eighty, ninety years later—in a time of rising Islam and not exactly exhausted but transformed Communism—a sound bite like that would get a pundit zapped on Meet the Press or CNN for insubordinate “Islamophobia,” perhaps sending Fox News’s Bill Kristol, for one, into ridicule mode over intimations of the coming Islamic empire known as the caliphate.13 Meanwhile, just as pointing out Communism’s stated goal to control the world was once a prompt for charges of “Red-baiting,” now pointing out Islam’s stated goal to impose its totalitarian system of religion, law, and politics onto the world is a prompt for charges of “Islamophobia.”

Islam, we are told, has nothing to do with anything bad. How could it? Islam means “peace,” said the forty-third president of the United States. No, in fact, Islam means “submission.” There’s a huge difference, and it explains why Islam celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers in Gaza, Kabul, and Queens. Dhimmitude, already evident in our society, goes a long way to explain why we didn’t dare show that we had noticed.

What we were witnessing was the marshaling forces of the latest, greatest Big Lie. This was one Big Lie I didn’t have to stumble across in an out-of-print book or extract from 1950s congressional testimony. I could watch it evolve close up and in real time as a matter of professional as well as national interest. I saw how, pace Communist penetration of yore, this Big Lie was actively pressed on us by cadres of agents of Islam and their own armies of useful fools: members of the Muslim Brotherhood fobbed off as advocates of a pluralistic, American Islam, the Iran Lobby, Saudi princelings, the international Islamic bloc now known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Bush administration, the Obama administration, practically anyone on a TV soundstage. All “reasonable people,” they peddled the same Big Lie: Islam is a religion of peace.

The history of the decade that followed, then, became a stuttering story of mongrel words and phrases (from “Islamofascism” to “violent extremism”) and morphing suffixes (“ist,” “ism”). It was a time of now-you-see-it, now-you-don’t terminology (jihad, jihadist, sharia, mujahideen, shahid, taqqiyya, jizya, caliphate). Apt phrases became verboten (“Islamic terrorism,” “Muslim violence,” “Islamic jihad”), as did concepts uniquely or characteristically Islamic: religious supremacism, censorship, slavery, pederasty, “honor killings,” “grooming,” and totalitarianism, among others. We may have intuited that “apostasy” did not go out with Galileo, and that beheadings did not end with the French Revolution, but … Islam is a religion of peace. The real threat, we decided to believe, or thought we had no choice but to believe (or just didn’t think), is “violent extremism.”

Limiting our brains to this empty phrase, however, has done extreme violence to our thought processes. Like a navy of Captain Hillses helming a fleet of Arawas, we sail on, blind, deaf, and dumb. Hills only spent four years becoming brainwashed by paeans to “Uncle Joe” and Communism. We have spent more than a decade listening to propaganda about “Uncle Mo” and “the religion of peace.” Just as Captain Hills had no context to understand the fears of his human cargo bound for Gulag slavery and death, we have no context to discuss Islam and its designs on liberty, on conscience, on apostates, on elderly cartoonists in Scandinavia. At every level, we have censored the knowledge essential to such an understanding. After all, if the problem is “violent extremism,” what’s the problem? Have a nice flight.

Here’s the problem: “Violent extremism” is not terminology that informs or clarifies; it is what French scholar Alain Besançon has called “the language of ideology” and “official vocabulary.” When the individual accepts this official ideological lexicon from authority with a capital A, he is lost. Besançon writes:

The moment the individual accepts the language of ideology, he allows his mental world and his sense of self-respect to be hijacked along with the language. No matter how inadvertently he may have stumbled into the use of the official vocabulary, he is now part of the ideology, and has, in a manner of speaking, entered into a pact with the devil [emphasis added].14

The importance of this pact cannot be overestimated. At a certain point, the language of ideology binds the brain to ideology, “hijacking” thought, individualism, and self-respect along the way. Besançon was writing about the trap of twentieth-century totalitarianism. The comparison to Islam, however, is apt. Islam is totalitarian, sharing numerous attributes with Communism and Nazism both—blueprints for world domination, control of private and public life (including speech), demotion of despised groups to inferior status, one-party (or all Islamic parties) political systems. Once upon a time, such comparisons between Islam and totalitarianism formed an area of learned study mined by all manner of Western academics and students of history. Noted scholars in the first half of the twentieth century even used Islam’s violent and fanatical example to explain the workings of Nazism and Communism.15

There is another pertinent comparison to be made: Both despotisms induce paralysis in the West. The Netherlands’ Geert Wilders made this point explicit in a 2010 speech. Listing the striking similarities among Islam, Communism, and Nazism, Wilders said:

There is one more striking parallel, but this is not a characteristic of the three political ideologies, but one of the West. It is the apparent inability of the West to see the danger … Our inability leads us to reject the logical and historical conclusions to be drawn from the facts, though we could and should know better. What is wrong with modern Western man that we make the same mistake over and over again?16

Nothing short of that pact with the devil invoked by Besançon begins to explain this problem. It was a soul-selling deal our forebears made with Communism as represented by its Soviet regime. We, as their heirs, must come to terms with it. We will continue to pay, just as Solzhenitsyn said we would, until we do. The lies will continue to redouble and compound, and the complicity, too, and thus become our own, and then our children’s.

Wilders delivered this speech in Berlin one day before the tenth anniversary of the reunification of the two Germanys—divided from one another, of course, in that great “victory” of ours in World War II. It was a declaration against the Islamization of Germany, but it was also a declaration against all totalitarian creeds. Wilders invoked Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky’s belief that the West “never won the Cold War, never even fought it” because for most of the time the West appeased Communism and, as Bukovsky put it, “appeasers don’t win wars.” Wilders then said:

Islam is the Communism of today. But, because of our failure to come clean with Communism, we are unable to deal with it, trapped as we are in the old Communist habit of deceit and double-speak that used to haunt the countries in the East and that now haunts all of us [emphasis added].17

Islam is the totalitarian threat of today. However, because we continue the “deceit and double-speak” we adopted in response to Communism, we are unable to deal with the new threat—the new Communism of today. We deal with Islam the same way we dealt with Communism: Having been subverted and undermined, we apologize and converge.

As Wilders asked, What is wrong with modern Western man? Did something happen to him? I think the answer is yes: Communism happened to him. Solomon aside, there was something novel under the Communist sun; under the shorter-lived Nazi sun, too. In his 1998 book Century of Horrors: Communism, Nazism, and the Uniqueness of the Shoah, Alain Besançon explains what that was: “Communism and Nazism set out to change something more fundamental than mores—that is, the very rule of morality, of our sense of good and evil. And in this, they committed acts unknown in prior human experience.”18

And in this, our world was transformed. Besançon’s focus on a discernible moral shift shines like a beam of light to reveal a switch in the continuum of human experience. It even offers something to hold on to, an anchor against answerless mental drift, in the search for a basis of understanding, maybe even a point from which to reclaim our moral bearings. “On or about December 1910 human character changed,” Virginia Woolf once wrote, a line that became quite famous even if 1910 doesn’t stand out to us as a monumental threshold, especially with World War I in the offing. In the end, though, she was only off by a decade or so.

Solzhenitsyn saw this same sea change sweep in with Communism. He wrote:

Communism has never concealed the fact that it rejects all absolute concepts of morality.

So, too, does Islam, which makes lying obligatory in cases where lying advances Islam.

It scoffs at any considerations of “good” and “evil” as indisputable categories. Communism considers morality to be relative … But I must say that in this respect, Communism has been very successful.

One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.

He continued:

It has infected the whole world with the belief in the relativity of good and evil. Today, many people apart from the Communists are carried away by this idea. Among progressive people, it is considered rather awkward to use seriously such words as “good” and “evil.” Communism has managed to persuade all of us that these concepts are old-fashioned and laughable.19

Where “good” and “evil” are old-fashioned and laughable (and bracketed by quotation marks), moral relativism takes hold—Lenin’s universal legacy.20 Solzhenitsyn wondered what would happen next: “But if we are to be deprived of the concepts of good and evil, what will be left? Nothing but the manipulation of each other.”21

The manipulation of each other through the manipulation of narratives. The fact is—can I say that?—facts no longer carry greater weight than Authority’s narrative. That’s what happens without immutable morality, without Good and Evil: Objective fact, reasoning powers, logical deduction, and sound judgment must compete with lies, with propaganda, with agitprop, with deception, with coercion, with power, with violence. Whoever’s narrative is louder, bigger, stronger, or more dangerous is going to prevail.

Before Communism left the realm of theory to become manifest in a state in 1917, Good and Evil commanded a consensus as roughly immutable as any code observed by human beings can be. That would change, despite multitudes of rank-and-file Communists who undoubtedly believed they were supporting Good and opposing Evil. With the 1929 Depression, our confidence in free markets was shot; by the early 1930s, our deepest moral codes were under assault. Recognition in 1933 opened the floodgates. The U.S.-USSR relationship pitted a Judeo-Christian and primarily Anglo-Saxon notion of trust and bond against the ruthless expediency of a revolutionary and amoral regime. To initiate relations, the Terror Famine had to be ignored; a great moral crime on our part. To maintain relations, we had to shun the facts. For example, if it were a condition of recognition that the Russians cease and desist clandestine measures to overthrow the USA—and it was such a condition—then continued recognition in the face of continued clandestine measures to overthrow the USA was wrong. It didn’t make sense according to the terms of the agreement. By rights, Soviet subversion inside the USA should have canceled or suspended the contract. Instead, in a world in which ideological means and ends were replacing rule of law—in a government increasingly penetrated by Soviet agents—it didn’t make a bit of difference. So began the slipperiest slope ever to the slough of complete subversion.

The relationship between Soviet Russia and the West, then, was always predicated on lies: Soviet Russia told them … and then the West told them, too. It didn’t have to have been that way. Not even two years after the recognition he’d championed, William C. Bullitt already foresaw the impossibility of normal relations with the abnormal regime. He had realized the USSR was, no matter what its leaders said to the contrary, still determined “to produce world revolution.” His analysis of the Soviet state of mind was prescient:

Diplomatic relations with friendly states are not regarded by the Soviet government as normal friendly relations but “armistice” relations and it is the conviction of the leaders of the Soviet Union that this “armistice” cannot possibly be ended by a definite peace, but only by a renewal of battle … Peace is looked upon merely as a happy respite in which future battles may be prepared.22

Bullitt was describing a Communist phenomenon, but I haven’t seen a better definition of hudna, the Islamic term for temporary armistice, outside the Islamic Encyclopedia. Which, again, makes sense: Totalitarian Islam and Communism are both revolutionary movements that drive forward to impose their dominion on all the earth—“unceasing struggle with all other cultures,” as Conquest put it in a phrase describing Communist Russia, but equally suitable to Islamic jihad.23 Any halt in that drive, any pause in the struggle, is temporary. Such points of doctrine, however, fail to fit the preferred narrative of authority: Communism and Islam are both religions of peace. Orwell was already late to the party when in 1936 he observed the end of “neutral fact” and Koestler concurred. Human character—our nation’s character—had already changed, or been changed.

I’m going to flip the calendar forward to 1969, when Yuri Besmenov, later known as Tomas Schuman, was contemplating his defection to the West. Born in 1939, Besmenov was a highly trained linguist who had never lived in a world with neutral fact or functioned without lies, big and small. As a KGB-trained “journalist” with Novosti, a joint creation of the Central Committee’s agitprop department and the KGB, Besmenov was himself quite skilled at creating them—“changing perception,” as he put it. For some extraordinary reason, Besmenov—possessing that “certain lucidity of heart and soul” that Solzhenitsyn said could still exist in societies “benumbed by … lies” (less so in the West24)—was able to see through it all, including through himself and everyone around him. Later, he set down his remarkable thoughts at that moment:

Observing the world-wide destruction of human minds caused by my motherland, unresisted and unpunished, and meditating about how easily all that mind-warping could be stopped, I wanted to believe that there, in the West, some people and organizations we call “reactionary circles” know the situation and how to deal with our subversion. They had done it, for some reason unknown to me at that time. But when needed, I thought, they would stop us for their own good [emphasis added].

Hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Defectors never seem to have imagined the extent to which Soviet efforts to subvert the West were already successful. He continued.

Later, in India, I was surprised to realize that no one even thought we were doing anything wrong to their country. Are they blind and deaf? Or is there something that makes them unaware of impending danger? “I must defect and open their eyes,” I thought.

We will meet the Americans and we will tell them.

“But,” as Besmenov would conclude, “no one wanted either my information or to open up their eyes.”25

Blind and deaf.

Why?

All these decades later, no one wants information or to open their eyes to the Muslim Brotherhood’s self-described “civilization jihad,” either.26 It hurts our heads. It exhausts our limited lexicon of ideology. I always wonder whether it is the inhumanity of totalitarian ideologies that somehow drives us from full acknowledgment, as if we recoil from the abyss in which we perceive our complicity and winnowing self-respect. Fresh evidence, then, corroborating facts, and clarity of language become doubly, triply worse than any of the depredations or even inhumanity of the offending creed. Evidence exposes moral compromise, and, as we’ve seen, nothing is worse than exposure. It becomes a matter of self-preservation and a point of pride, then, to sunder the links between facts and conclusion. Welcome to the world of “PC.”

And what is “PC”? The tag itself, I have come to realize, creates a lingustic cul-de-sac where we just park our brains. “PC” is, gosh, “PC.” We look no further. Sure, the acronym “PC”—“political correctness”—conveys the idea that something is phony, forced, and ideologically, not logically, inspired, but it doesn’t advertise its bona fide totalitarian provenance in the language of ideology, which, once accepted, once internalized, draws an individual into that ideological pact with the devil in which reasoning powers are lost. In other words, “PC” is just another label for Big Lies—little lies, too. It describes the systematic suppression of fact that advances and sustains the ideology of the State and its barricades in academia, media, and other cultural outposts. Big and Bigger Brother. It is a grievous offense against objectivity in every instance, from “chairperson” and “affirmative action” to “overseas contingency operations” and “blue on green” attacks, not to mention all the thoughts that go unexpressed altogether. These moral capitulations to ideological censorship ultimately block the flow of thought itself. Evidence is denigrated; logic is discarded—and it happened here.

Remember FDR’s fond hopes for convergence? “PC” is one result, its origins in twentieth-century totalitarianism. Such ideology is not innate to Western republics. Indeed, the Cold War between the West and Communism was not a struggle between two ideologies as it is commonly framed. The Western approach, as Robert Conquest writes, “was not an ideological one at all.” Western culture, he explains, “had, in a general way, a view of politics which included political liberty and the rule of law. It did not have a universal and exclusively defined mind-set.”27 Liberty is not a mind-set; it defies mind-set. That said, the struggle between the United States and the USSR was over ideology, all right—a struggle to resist the imposition of Communist ideology in the West, particularly following the debacle of World War II.

Then on 9/11 came the second totalitarian wave.

With our tragic past of deceit and double talk, no wonder we readily ceded the history, canon, and terminology of Islam for a new Big Lie, “Islam is peace.” The government tells us “violent extremism” is what endangers us; what reason do we have to doubt it? We have no reason—capacity to reason, that is, not anymore. We have surrendered the tools of thought.

In his contribution to the famous 1949 collection of essays by ex-Communists titled The God That Failed, Arthur Koestler carefully illustrates how set language binds thought to ideology at the expense of evidence. He describes a conversation he had early in his Communist career with “Edgar,” his Party contact, in which they discuss the front page of a Communist newspaper.

“But every word on the front page is contradicted by the facts,” I objected.

Edgar gave me a tolerant smile. “You still have the mechanistic outlook, he said, and then proceeded to give me the dialectical interpretation of the facts …

Gradually, I learned to distrust my mechanistic preoccupation with facts and to regard the world around me in the light of dialectical interpretation. It was a satisfactory and indeed blissful state; once you had assimilated the technique, you were no longer disturbed by the facts [emphasis added].28

Here, recounting his experience as a German Communist in the 1930s, Koestler is nonetheless describing the post-Communist, postmodern, post-9/11 American condition. It is the sinister overhaul of language and thought—so familiar!—that he personally engaged in, and that was and is the primary tool of Marxist and Islamic subversion. “Not only our thinking, but also our vocabulary was reconditioned,” he explains. “Certain words were taboo.”29 Certain other words became telltales by which to identify dissenters or enemies. Literary, artistic, and musical tastes, he writes, were “similarly reconditioned” to support the renunciation of independent thought and logic necessary to submit to ideology.

We cast off our intellectual baggage like passengers on a ship seized by panic, until it became reduced to the strictly necessary minimum of stock phrases, dialectical clichés and Marxist quotations … To be able to see several aspects of a problem and not only one, became a permanent cause of self-reproach. We craved to be single- and simple-minded.30

We crave this, too, or just go along with it, which is worse. And the U.S. government itself is happy to oblige:

Don’t Invoke Islam.

Don’t Harp on Muslim Identity.

Avoid the Term ‘Caliphate.’

Never Use the Term ‘Jihadist’ or ‘Mujahideen.’31

Such is the spawn of liberty’s rendezvous with totalitarianism. In Roosevelt’s hoped-for “convergence”—the rape of the West—we have become born liars, dupes, or both, our roots drawing from a tank of lies dug far deeper into our past than I ever used to imagine, back in a time when it seemed that “grown-ups,” rational and moral actors, were still in charge. So much for “American exceptionalism,” but so be it. The “Good War”? Please. The war to make the world safe for Gulags seems a little closer to the mark. The “moral clarity” of World War II we yearn for isn’t just a canard but a psychodelic fantasy, testament to the staying power of one seductively potent placebo—the false narrative made vivid, lifelike, and indelible. “All we have to fear is fear itself”? No, it turns out there was much more to fear than that. The lies. The corrupting lies. Confess them all. Be done with “damage control” forever.

We lost World War II, wrote Martin Dies.

Yes.

We lost the Cold War, wrote Vladimir Bukovsky.

I would have to agree.

We even made everything worse in the process, writes one final iconoclast: British soldier and historian General J. F. C. Fuller.

Oh, great.

In 1949, Fuller wrote, “Though Germany was defeated and National Socialism overthrown, Russia and Stalinism took their place. Great Britain was bankrupted and her empire is now in a state of dissolution; and yearly America is spending billions of dollars to stem the Communist flood.”32

He might well have added, America was also turning Europe pink and socialist in the process through Marshall Plan aid “because the Americans who ran it applied to European recovery methods of social planning which are anathema to most business men,” enthused British Socialist R. H. S. Crossman in 1950.33

I can still feel pushback from decades of “Good War” conditioning: But, but … how could Uncle Sam not have done everything possible to stop Hitler in Europe and save the Jews? Well, you know what, America? Uncle Sam didn’t do everything possible to stop Hitler in Europe; otherwise, the war might well have ended no later than 1943. Nor did Uncle Sam do everything to save the Jews—not the last million, not the last hundred. These blasted bits of history leave us … where?. Someplace, I’m afraid, with the poor fellow in Yeats’s “Meru”:

Civilisation is hooped together, brought

Under a rule, under the semblance of peace

By manifold illusion; but man’s life is thought,

And he, despite his terror, cannot cease

Ravening through century after century

Ravening, raging, and uprooting that he may come

Into the desolation of reality.

Having done a little ravening and uprooting of my own, I have to say I’ve come a long way from my freshman fall at Yale when I met a sunny-faced boy from Ohio who happened to tell me (can’t recall why) that his parents—both of them, by the way, white-haired physicians—hated, but hated, Franklin Roosevelt. In a way, maybe that’s where this book began. In Freddy’s household, Roosevelt’s name was mud. L.A. born and Hollywood bred, I couldn’t have been more puzzled. How could this be? My dad’s first vote as a GI in northern Europe somewhere between D-day and the Bulge was for Roosevelt; my mom’s family was Roosevelt all the way. I didn’t get it, couldn’t get it. Freddy came from Ohio—home, I later learned, of “Mr. Republican,” Senator Robert Taft, son of President Taft, who entered national politics to try to guard the Constitution against the New Deal. (I lived in Taft entryway one year. Maybe not a harmonic convergence, but I like the connection.) Freddy also liked vanilla milkshakes. I remember putting that and his family’s politics down to the exotica of the heartland. Even a quarter century later, when, at a used-book store in Vermont, I somewhat fatefully picked up a 1979 book titled Roosevelt, Churchill, and the World War II Opposition: A Revisionist Autobiography by George T. Eggleston, I could detect the residual radioactivity that wafted off the cover. Was I holding in my hands a book by a fascist, a Nazi? Or, maybe worse in the American context, an “isolationist”?

Isolationist yes, and, as an explanation of the point of view, intriguingly and even persuasively so.34 In fact, I recommend the book to anyone interested in continuing this cultural reexamination. The process is vital not only to understanding our past but to mounting a successful rediscovery and restoration of “Americanism”—allegiance to the principles contained in the Declaration and the Constitution. Something is not right in this democratic republic, and it’s getting worse.

Then again, is this a democratic republic?

That, too, becomes a trick question after peering past history’s mirrors. In 1955, journalist and author John T. Flynn, one of the most famous and prolific critics of statism, collectivism, and Roosevelt (not necessarily in that order), argued in The Decline of the American Republic that following the Depression-triggered, war-entrenched Roosevelt-Truman revolution in spending, taxation, regimentation, and centralization known as the New Deal, and, later, less memorably, as the Fair Deal, the essential character of American society changed beyond recognition. The USA, Flynn wrote in that formative year of McDonald’s, “Rock Around the Clock,” and Disneyland, bore only “an external and superficial resemblance” to the republic that had existed for 144 years until 1933—and who even knew the difference by 1955 when Americans forty years of age (b. 1915) had no adult memory of anything different? The Constitution, of course, remained officially unchanged, Flynn noted. “It has been done by sheer usurpation of power by the federal government.”35

As if to agree, Norman Thomas, perennial Socialist candidate for president, was moved to write in 1953, “Here in America more measures once praised or denounced as socialist have been adopted than once I should have thought possible short of a Socialist victory at the polls.”36

Are you saying everyone who voted for X, Y, and Z were or are Socialists?

No, because I doubt that was the case. These legislators, however, almost without pause, voted for law after law that increased our reliance on, and our subservience to, the burgeoning state. Whether liberal-, Marxist-, Communist-, Socialist-, or Fascist-inspired—and there are strong parallels among these totalitarian systems, as Jonah Goldberg has argued compellingly in Liberal Fascism—our history since Roosevelt has been one of an expanding central government. (Even under Ronald Reagan, the federal government spending grew more than 3 percent.37) A state that took on the guise of paternalism in the early 1930s has become increasingly authoritarian, thuggish, even, and the citizens who sought or accepted that “helping hand” have become both wardlike and less free.

As far back as 1934, The New York Times trumpeted NEW DEAL PATERNALISM IMPERILS ALL INDIVIDUALISM.38 The article describes a speech by Massachusetts governor Joseph Ely at a conference of America’s governors. “There is no stopping short of the end of the road,” Ely said, “and at the end of the road we shall have a socialistic state.” Invoking Stalin in Russia, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany—all newly minted dictators—Ely pointed out that where these despots ruled, “individualism had passed from the people to dictators making the people the ‘children of government.’”

Echoes of de Tocqueville. One century earlier, the French visionary described the infantilizing effect of a paternalistic despotism in America. Imagining the “immense, protective power” of a state with “absolute” power, and likening such power to “parental authority,” which keeps citizens in “perpetual childhood,” he wondered, “Why should it not entirely relieve them from the trouble of thinking and all the cares of living?”39 It would seem that the mortal blow against the “grown-up”—the free citizen—was struck, softly, once liberty was no longer paramount in this country, once ideology began to take precedence over facts, once we traded in the American ideal of “rugged individualism” for the material markers of “the American dream.” If once upon a time Americans subscribed to our Founders’ belief that our Creator endowed us with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, there came a time when we expected a package of perks—car, house, Play Station—to sweeten the deal. Suddenly, those perks became darn near an entitlement, an attitude entirely befitting the subjects in Tocqueville’s absolute state. In fact, measured in material goods as it is, the contemporary “American dream” is a vision driven by the Marxist belief in the primacy of the economic.

From recognition to convergence.

No wonder Norman Thomas was tickled by the direction of the country in the Eisenhower years. By 1958, he was beside himself. “The United States is making greater strides toward socialism under Eisenhower than even under Roosevelt,” he enthused.40 By 1962, the man who had run for president on the Socialist ticket six times had concluded that “the difference between Democrats and Republicans is: Democrats have accepted the ideas of socialism cheerfully, while Republicans have accepted them reluctantly.”41 Just not by name. As Upton Sinclair put it in a 1951 letter to Thomas, “The American People will take Socialism, but they won’t take the label.”42

We take the Big Lie instead. Euphemism. Official vocabulary. Language of ideology. The “PC” pact with the devil. The Big Lie as big con. The narrative of authority. How to stand athwart false history and yell “Stop!”? The answer finally seems clear. If once it was vitally important to shore up America’s bastions, something else is called for now. What’s needed is a full-scale assault on those bastions of unreality, those safe houses of secrets, all in a painful but restorative effort to upend the narratives of authority, to break open the conspiracies of silence, which have endured through too many lifetimes. Put another way, it’s time to avenge the victims and the truth tellers, the voiceless and the voices of one. It’s time to avenge the American betrayal of Liberty herself.