As I’ve written before, there are certain buzzwords I simply will not be gaslit into using.
‘Biological man/woman’, for instance: this is a tautology as ridiculous as ‘equine horse’. But its very ridiculousness is half the point. “It is clear,” wrote George Orwell in an essay accompanying 1984, “that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes”. In this case, as so often, the cause is deliberate manipulation of language by the ruling elite, which in our time, is the left. Because their dogmas are invariably so obvious foolish, the only way they can make them seem plausible is to make language equally foolish.
“The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts” – Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”.
Another fashionable buzzword I refuse to be gaslit into using is Islamism.
The purpose of this ridiculous neologism is as obvious as it is insidious: to trick us into believing that the swivel-eyed jihadis cutting off heads in Western streets are somehow ‘not real Islam’.
The very ridiculousness of the word is exemplified in its definition, per Britannica: “Islamism is a political ideology that advocates for the reordering of government and society according to Islamic law, distinct from the religion of Islam itself.” This is a self-contradictory statement: the religion of Islam itself makes no such distinction. Islam is a total system, of government, law and society. Under orthodox Islamic teaching, all law and government proceed from the religion, not separate to it.
Islamic scholar Dr Ja’far Sheikh Idris stated it plainly:
The blessings of Islam cannot flourish in a Muslim society when moral values and practices of Prayer, Charity and Fasting are separated from the state because the total package of Islam guides us through every principle of running the state and thus the principles of bringing true goodness into our lives. Muslims have no choice but to reject secularism […] Separation of dîn and state is not an option for Muslims because it requires us to abandon Allah’s decree for that of man.
Yet, this nonsensical gaslighting has been so astonishingly successful that even conservatives will parrot it without a second’s thought.
Writing in the Australian, economist Henry Ergas railed against a ‘culture of confusion’ that has sapped the West. All well and good. The only problem is that he headlined it with the very sort of confused weasel-wording he was complaining about.
Islamism has exploited our culture of political confusion.
The irony of just the headline alone was bad enough. But then Ergas proceeds to pontificate about:
An intellectually incoherent cultural relativism. If stoning adulterers and amputating thieves’ hands are barbaric, then a culture that has abandoned those practices is, in that respect, better than one that retains them. To deny even that turns humility in judging other cultures into a prohibition on moral judgment – and therefore on moral progress, which necessarily implies that some ways of life are preferable to those they supersede […] multiculturalism has supplied powerful incentives to remain apart: subsidising organisations devoted to preserving separateness and then hailing its persistence as evidence of the policy’s success […]
That is the ground on which Islamism has become entrenched.
No, the ground that has become entrenched, occupied, colonised and almost completely overrun by the weeds of foolish thoughts is the fertile ground of the muddled heads of those who’ve already surrendered, but are incapable of realising it.
As soon as someone like Ergas unthinkingly parrots a lying buzzword like Islamism, they’ve already given their mental ground up to the invading mind-virus. But, like the industrious ant turned into a mindless zombie by a brain-rotting fungus, they’ll march on to civilisational suicide without a whimper of complaint.
