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Utterly Predictable

Submitted by Fred Baehr, Jun 17, 2011 11:48

If it weren't utterly predictable, I doubt I could have predicted it all so perfectly. I have no crystal ball, but it seems I can see the future. From the very beginning last January I told my friends to watch the MB take over. Their reactions were variously to laugh it off or to say it was just fine because the MB is not a bad bunch, just democratically inclined Egyptian reformers. I was roundly condemned as an Islamophobe for saying the MB is a reactionary religious movement bent on the establishment of their own theocracy and the destruction of Israel. My problem in seeing all this correctly, I was told, was because my hatred for Islam colored my judgement.

Alright, I admit it, I do despise Islam as a religion. I also despise Nazis and Maoists. I also despise the whole multi-cultural-moral-relativist movement. I come out of the free speech movement of the 60's and we started this ball rolling, but it has become our Frankenstein. Now there is only free speech for one side, "the right side", the far left side. If you disagree with much of the new gospel of universal relativism, you, like me, will be outcast as a neocon. You will be called "unevolved".

Now I find that even this situation was utterly predictable. Read "The Treason Of The Intellectuals", and you, like me, may be surprised at how eerily contemporary to the United States in the 21st century a book from 1920's France can seem.

I have been called every variant of "backward" you ever heard but my predictions keep coming true. It makes me think I may have my finger on the pulse of reality somehow and it gives me some confidence as to my analysis of events, but it gives me very little joy. I had hoped, back in those heady days of my youth, for a world gone beyond the last gasps of medieval superstition, sectarianism, and tribalism. But it now seems to me that I did not understand much of what I and others were saying, because we encouraged tribalism in our romantic (utterly uninformed) view of human events. While I still think we did some kind of good back then I have found the good effects of it more and more difficult to identify. My generation has become as complacent as our parents'. Only the issues have changed.

My becoming an outcast of the left has caused me much. I have lost more than a few old friends over it all. I have been insulted with impunity by very polite people. When my comments turn out to have been prescient they are dismissed all the same. I'm playing a tune they don't want to hear no matter how well it harmonizes with events. So when (not if) the MB takes over Egypt and begins to construct a Sunni Islamic state based on Sharia traditions I will not be surprised and my old friends will not notice, just as they do not now notice how repressive and regressive this global Islamic is.

 

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