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From todays Points to Ponder at American RealPolitik
Devil theories are becoming more important every day. Apparently, the failed cultures and ideologies of the world -- Islam; Marxian socialism; social-welfare fascism -- need to see their failure as someone else's fault, just as inter-war Germans did. There's no hiding their failures. No exertion of wishful thinking could convince Middle Eastern Muslims that they've seized the brass ring of human progress. Socialists cannot abide the suggestion that there was some error in their theories about state control of the means of production; the theory was too appealing, too elaborate, too perfect. American social-welfare fascists -- a.k.a. left-liberals -- cannot be dissuaded that, once the government has made everything either compulsory or forbidden and bludgeoned everyone into accepting their definition of "tolerance," there'll be full employment, wide-screen HDTV, and copious disease-free orgasms for everyone.
So all these groups are looking for someone to blame.
The socialists, especially in Europe, have decided to blame America. America makes an appealing devil: distant, powerful, and radically at odds with socialist doctrines. If they can persuade themselves that American cultural, economic and military "imperialism" is the cause of their failures -- and they really want to -- they can evade the blame for the horrors socialism has inflicted on its victims.
American left-liberals want equally desperately to believe in the corrupting power of the "vast right-wing conspiracy." Considering the mountains of ridicule they've heaped upon right-wing conspiratorialists, you'd think they'd be alive to the dangers of such a position, but never mind. Thoroughgoing government regulation of everything from interracial and inter-gender relations to the smallest details of the national marketplace simply had to succeed. Evil forces must have been at work.
Of Islam, there's not much new to say. The world's 1.3 billion Muslims are the most squalid, backward, unfree peoples in the world. How could this be? They've been perfectly faithful to the dictates of the Prophet. They were promised dominion in this world and Paradise in the next. What went wrong? Allah's enemies must have plotted against them! The Jews! The Christians! Wipe them out, institute universal shari'a, and surely all will thereafter be well!
Seldom has so much human folly been available for inspection all at once. -- Francis W. Porretto
11:22:38 AM 
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