The Left's Conspiracy of Silence

I noted in an earlier post, "Deafening Left-Wing Silence on Islamist Barbarism," how the radical left routinely launches unhinged attacks on the Bush administration and its "faux-warrior" backers, but we hear nary a word of denuciation against the most depraved inhumanities committed by the warriors of the "religion of peace."

I noted:

In the midst of the widespread distribution of the most barbarian videotape on Islamic depravity yet seen, the hard-left blogosphere's been deafeningly AWOL in joining the online campaign denouncing the violence.Instead, we get top surrender voices like Glenn Greenwald waving his own hare-brained bloody shirt against "the handful of Muslim-obsessed faux-warriors" he imagines are the real threat to civilization.

It turns out Dr. Sanity puts some psychiatric analysis to the problem in her post, "A Conspiracy of Silence":

Most family therapists are familiar with the "conspiracy of silence" that occurs in families desperate to avoid an unpleasant realty or painful truth. For example, it can be seen in the unwillingness to talk about a catastrophe or death; to pretend even, that the traumatic event never occurred. The movie Ordinary People showed the destructive power of this kind of silence on one member of a family, which eventually split apart the entire family. The conspiracy can descend when there is sexual abuse going on within the family and other members look away and act like everything is normal, ignoring even the most blatant warning signs. The phrase has also been used to describe the indifference of onlookers when some terrible event is happening to others (e.g., Darfur) and they lift no finger to help.

Elie Wiesel wrote passionately about this sort of conspiracy during the Holocaust. He said, talking about the victims in the concentration camps, "The worse sort of cruelty would have been incapable of breaking the prisoner; it was the silence of those he believed to be his friends—cruelty more cowardly, more subtle—which broke his heart.There was no longer anyone on whom to count … It … poisoned the desire to live… If this is the human society we come from—and are now abandoned by—why seek to return?"

That is why Wiesel believed, "...to remain silent and indifferent is the greatest sin of all...". Yet it is an all too human defense brought to bear when the consequences of facing reality would be overwhelming.

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wrote about an "obtuseness of mind, a gradual stupefying process" that occurs when people desperately try to avoid a reality with which they cannot or do not want to cope. Sometimes it is accompanied by real hysterical blindness; or sometimes just an incredible indifference to truth.

This obtuseness perfectly describes the state of mind of the MSM as they try to come to grips with something that goes counter to their multicultural template; a template where all the left's 'approved' victim groups--such as the poor, oppressed Palestinians and other Islamic terrorist groups--are NEVER the perpetrators of violence, but are always the victims of it.

This also describes the nihilist left in the United States, which cheers the deployment in Iraq of mentally impaired women as human bombs:

I think it's just horrible that whoever was behind this latest disaster used Down's women to perpetrate the bombings but I don't see it as a sign of desperation. I see it as a sign of adaptation and a brilliant one at that.

As Dr. Sanity adds:

There is almost always an identified family 'scapegoat' on whom all the problems of the family can be blamed (and who can be the recipient of all that intense affect and emotion which rightfully should be directed elsewhere were it not for the conspiracy of silence).

In the case of the unspoken conspiracy between the poitical left and those in the media when it come to the issue of terrorism, it has been fairly clear for some time that America and the Bush Administration receive the full force of all the anger, rage, and fear they feel.

Psychologically and personally, the separation of affect and emotion from the real issue and its redirection toward someone or something that is less offensive or threatening in order to avoid the real threat and to maintain the cherished multicultural dogma they are so invested in is quite comforting for a while. The family members can pretend that they are 'loyal' and good people; especially when they persecute and torment the scapegoat.

On a larger scale, this is, of course, the same type of psychodynamic that lead to genocide. And it all begins with a conspiracy of silence and the obsessive avoidance of an uncomfortable truth.

Note also, as evidenced by the occasional drive-by commenter here (Sheldon), just to point out these trends, for the left, amounts to "The surest sign there is of superficiality of thought."

Oh sure, it's superficial in note that 12 year-old American boys are not beheading captured enemy combatants here in the U.S., who are affording the most generous due process of law anywhere in the world.

No, the truth hurts, and frankly only psychology can explain the intense hatred of the United States and the embrace of our enemies by our most implacable America-bashers here at home.