Jihad Watch

I have dedicated the day to sweep the internet, starting at usual at Red Liberal.

Taken a cue from John's Iberian Notes, I read a comparison of Freud and Ortega in The New Criterion.. I highlight the last two paragraphs:

Although Ortega is genuinely disdainful of fascism, seeing it as the apogee of mass man, there seems to me something at least proto-fascist, and possibly more than proto-fascist, in his solution to the existential problem that he has so astutely characterized. He makes power the measure of all things, indeed he makes it the meaning of life. When he says that life is struggle, he does not mean merely that there are always obstacles to worthwhile achievement to be overcome, and that a life without such obstacles would be meaningless, but that domination of the world is the meaning of life, and all else, at least for Europe, is decadence. I don’t find this at all pleasant.

Yet, at the same time, and more memorably, Ortega points to the very danger that I see in his solution. He says that today, precisely because so much is possible, the worst is possible: regression, barbarity, decadence. Freedom and possibility necessarily include the freedom and possibility to do evil, which is something of which conservatives are aware but progressives tend to screen out of their minds. Of course, conservatives have, or tend to have, the opposite fault, to be unduly sceptical of the possibilities of doing good. But the existential limitations of human life, as sensitively described by Freud and Ortega, mean that it is far easier to do harm than good, and therefore that the faults of progressives and conservatives, while intellectually mirror images of one another, are not moral mirror images.

The fact that freedom and possibility gives people the freedom and opportunity of doing evil links directly to the apology of terror made by self-called Muslims and denounced by JihadWatch. (If the Fitna film is blocked at Google, check out the following link http://www.fok.nl/mirror/fitna.html.)

However, the solution is not less freedom for everyone (the statism offered by fascism and socialism), but directly fight the people that cause the evil and show everybody that their attitude is shameful. So please, "Muslim moderates", stand up and point to your fellows that those lines in the Quram that command to kill and terrorise are not actually Allah's word, but simply the "calls to arms" by Muhammad to gather support of the empoverish nomadic tribes to gain power in Saudi Arabia.

Love and freedom.