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Mob violence recently took place in L.A. and hundreds of other cities over Donald Trump’s efforts to obey the Constitution and “faithfully execute” the duties of the president, and carry out the laws by deporting illegal aliens. At the same time, Israel began a massive attack on Iran’s weapons and leaders in order to prevent that regime from acquiring nuclear weapons––which Iran now has a “zero- breakout-time” for achieving–– and fulfill the jihadists’ genocidal oath to “wipe Israel off the map,” as Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in 2003.
What links these events is the “big lie” of “stolen land,” indulged by the leftist Democrats in L.A., and Israel’s enemies everywhere. Leftists and jihadists both adhere to the precept “any means necessary,” which validates violence. But as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has said, the “big lie” is codependent with violence, “since it can conceal itself with nothing except the lie, and the lie has nothing to uphold it save violence.” Marxism is famous for both.
From the beginning, Karl Marx boasted of Marxists’ embrace of violence. In 1843 he threatened the Prussian government, “We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you. When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism.” The next year he publicized his “plan of action,” and stated, “Far from opposing the so-called excesses, those examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals and buildings which have acquired hateful memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a helping hand.” This, of course, foreshadows today’s leftist Dem politicians who support violent protests and riots, and those governors and congressmen who encourage and support the rioters.
True to Solzhenitsyn’s observation, Marxists have employed propaganda and “big lies” to legitimize their violence. This affinity for lying, which George Orwell’s phrase from 1984, “2+2= 5,” epitomized, was endemic among the Bolsheviks and their propaganda that penetrated every dimension of society and politics. Pierre Pascal, an apostate from Soviet communism, in 1924 wrote in his journal, No regime has ever been a regime of lies to this extent.”
Another repentant true believer, Boris Souvarine––anticipating Orwell––wrote of the Bolshevik’s public discourse, “Not one fact, not one quotation, not one idea, not one argument: only impudent affirmations with a half-dozen interchangeable words come from the ‘heights.’” We who have witnessed during the last decade the regime media repeating endlessly the same preposterous talking points, often word for word, know what Souvarine is talking about.
As for the jihadists, of course, violence against the enemies of Islam like Jews, Christians, and other “infidels,” is integral to the faith, as recorded in the Koran and hadith, and documented in 14 centuries of history. So too with the “big lie,” which is sanctioned by “taqiyya,” the legitimate practice of lying and deceiving, or even blaspheming against Allah, if the purpose is to defeat infidels and advance Islam’s empire. As Mohammed said, “war is deception,” and negotiating in bad faith is an important tactic of jihad––as Iran’s serial violations of the terms of the “Iran deal” illustrate.
But delusional Westerners, including many American self-proclaimed conservatives, reject these facts as the slanders of Islamophobes and, incoherently, “racists.” Even Hamas’ filming and publicizing the heinous slaughter of Jews on 10/7/23, replete with rape and torture inflicted on civilians and children, is not enough to deter privileged, badly educated American students and activists-for-hire, from carrying genocidal banners, waving the flag of Hamas, and indulging genocidal chants during their “mostly peaceful” protests.
The key lie featured in the Palestinian Arabs’ war against Israel is the “stolen land” canard, which also appeared in the universities’ Chicano movement in the Sixties. This identity politics myth-history claims that the whole Southwest was once Aztlán, the original homeland of La Raza, the “bronze” race, which was lost to the “brutal ‘gringo’ invasion.” The goal of the Chicano movement is a “reconquest” of their lost homeland. The racist drift of all this is obvious in the motto of MEChA, the Chicano student movement: “For the Race everything, outside the Race, nothing” –– a creepy reprise of Mussolini’s ethnonationalist and fascistic creed, “Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
The master mendacious narrative behind this and other “stolen land” fantasies, of course, is demonized Western imperialism and colonialism. Marxism has deformed those two historical phenomena into crimes specific to Western Civilization. As Pascal Bruckner has written, “We Europeans have been raised to detest ourselves, certain that within our world, there is a certain essential evil that must be relentlessly atoned for. This evil is known by two terms––colonialism and imperialism.”
The self-loathing West has accepted this Marxist historical lie, and the deformation of those words into what the historian of Soviet terrorism and mass murder, Robert Conquest, called “mind-blockers and thought extinguishers,” which serve “mainly to confuse, and of course to replace, the complex and needed process of understanding with the unneeded process of inflammation.” Of course, Marxists pass over the fact that when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar’s empire, they kept his central Asian possessions. And don’t forget the Eastern European states Stalin added to the Soviet empire after the Potsdam Conference.
This bastardization of history is the mother of all “big lies,” providing both the left and the jihadists with a ready-made cliché that makes the West the biggest villain of history, and the prime mover of all the world’s dysfunctions and troubles. That’s why the daughter of a Congresswoman in L.A. yelled “death to the colonial empire!” as her fellow protestors threw chunks of concrete at police officers. Such juvenile rhetoric has turned politically selected minority clients, no matter how privileged, into “victims” deserving of special treatment and consideration. For the Dems, these “victims” have––until the last election––been a huge constituency of reliable voters.
The California version of the “stolen land” fantasy chanted in L.A., however, has never really gotten much traction among Mexican-Americans, nor did the label “Chicano,” which was about as popular as the silly neologism “Latinx” is today. And the displays of Mexican flags will very likely turn out to be a tin-eared, arrogant faux pas during the next election. Interestingly, here in Fresno, our “no kings” protest was bristling with U.S. flags. Could the Democrat grown-ups be waking up?
But the Palestinian Arab exploitation of that “stolen land” lie has been more consequential and bloodier, fueling the conflict with support from Westerners, especially Europeans and the UN, who have funded the jihadist terror of Hamas and other Iranian proxies, and used their offices and programs to demonize Israel and compromise its security by legitimizing the anti-colonialist “stolen land” narrative.
This distortion of history is patently specious. Colonialism had nothing to do with Israel’s creation. In fact, it was the Wilsonian principles of national self-determination and animus against colonialism, as codified in the Versailles Treaty, that determined the fate of the Ottoman Empire and the Muslims and Jews who lived in its lost territories. That was the price the Sultan paid for picking the wrong side in World War I.
In short, Israel was created by the same mandate protocols and policies developee by international laws and agreements that created the new nations of Jordan, Syria, Beirut, and Lebanon. The significant difference is that several Arab nations, some of them members of the UN, invaded Jewish mandate territory to settle the issue with force.
Finally, it’s shameless for a people whose ancestors created one of the greatest colonial empires in history, to rely on evil Western “colonialism” arguments to justify eradicating Israel. As Middle East historian Efraim Karsh writes in Islamic Imperialism, during Islam’s expansion, Muslims “acted in typical imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands and expropriating their wealth, resource, and labor.” And while Europeans eventually left their colonies to the indigenous peoples, today Muslims still occupy the land that their ancestors “stole” from Romans and Greeks, Jews and Christians–– the civilizational foundations of the West.
Fortunately, now we have an administration and foreign policy team that acknowledges realism based on human nature, the facts of history, and common sense, rather than feckless idealism, Orwellian history, and canards like “stolen land.” Israel’s effort to keep a tyrannical regime from possessing nuclear weapons will benefit not just themselves, but all those peoples, including Muslims, who do not want to live in the shadow of a nuclear holocaust.