The Dead End of ‘The Enemy of My Enemy...’

This post is a response to a challenge from @SusanQuinn to elaborate on a comment I made on her post Joe Biden in Bed with Terrorists:

I am still scratching my head over how the Left thinks it will triumph over Islamism after their mutual support destroys freedom?

First, let's demonstrate that the Left, i.e., Progressivism, supports Islamism. "Support" in this context has multiple characteristics: (1) justifying acts that harm individuals, (2) opposing policies that limit the reach of Islamism, (3) providing an intellectual foundation for Islamism, and (4) integrating Islamists into the "intersectional" construct for favored treatment.

Richard Samuelson writing in Real Clear Politics lays out the development described above in his piece Why the Woke Supports Hamas. In it he describes the phenomena of support, but doesn't really address how the woke expect to conquer Islamism after the mutual enemy -- Western Civilization -- is destroyed. Samuelson focuses on the Jewish element in Western Civilization, but the principle is the same for Western Civilization writ large: Once you destroy the Jews, you find there are other targets within the larger framework of Western Civilization that must also be destroyed. Therefore, in the following paragraph, do not limit in your mind the reference to Jews alone. Think instead of the broader Western Civilization destruction project:

[T]odays wokesters combine the hatred of racial discrimination with a radical desire for a utopian future. And Jews are in the way of that project. That is hardly a novel turn in history. Hitler called the Holocaust the “Final Solution.” It was, more exactly, “The Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” Like today’s progressives, Hitler had hope for a better future: “I believe in a conclusive understanding among peoples which will come sooner or later. There is no point in bringing about co-operation among nations, based upon permanent understanding, until this Jewish fission-fungus of peoples has been removed.” Karl Marx said something similar. In his essay on “The Jewish Question,” Marx said that progress would not take place until Jews stopped being Jews. The Hamas Charter expresses a similar version of the Muslim apocalypse. All would be peace, plenty, and harmony on earth were it not for those meddling Yids.

So we are still left with how the Left can believe that having used Islamism to destroy Western Civilization, it will then be able to conquer Islamism in their push for utopia. Or does the Left believe they can integrate Islamism into their utopian vision? How would that work? How does Islamism give up its burqas? How does Islamism embrace the "pride" flag? How does Islamism accept that the State is not subordinate to Allah? Doesn't seem likely to me.

The more probable outcome seems to be the defeat of the Left. "Woke" institutions collectivize and create a "hive" mind. They promote the placidity that loss of individuality creates, but they lose creative energy in a fundamental sense. Oh, they can splash colors on the wall, but can they master the chemistry, the manufacturing organization, the distribution system that brought them those colors? Will institutions filled with people, selected for their roles because they "look like me", and having demonstrated their "woke" bona fides, be capable of maintaining and improving the civilization they inherited? Will automation come quickly enough that AI robots will be able to care for them (and defend them) in ways they themselves have not mastered?

It seems like a reach to me to believe that having successfully used Islamism to aid in the destruction of the West, that the Left is not itself destroyed by Islamism. As I also commented in the same thread referenced at the beginning of this post, to believe that pushes but one explanation:

The only thing that gives sane people pause in asserting Obama/Biden support for Islamism is the insanity of it. It is hard to square any rational argument for the outcome that such policies promote. Thus, how can it be true? And if it is true, how can we be in control of our own lives? If one awakens in the early hours in Bedlam, and realize it — and find that it is the staff as much as the residents who are insane — what absolute terror is that? No mind wishing to remain sane wants to accept that.

And yet, here we are. Fighting two enemies -- one is insane, the other barbaric. One is practicing the "enemy of my enemy is my friend"; the other is taking all the support the "woke" will give it while making no concessions to Progressive ideology. I have elaborated my comment as @SusanQuinn suggested, but I am having trouble getting any closer to a rational basis for Progressive support of Islamism.

Let's try and flip it: What harm comes to Progressivism if it stands with the West against Islamism? They can still have their intersectional philosophy without defenestrating gays and subordinating women. And since post-modernism denies history, is Progressivism not strengthened by avoiding an alliance with Islamism dependent on its millennia of grievance with the West? Well, there needs to be some grievance, thus history, so I guess post-moderns can't be pure about your lived experience today being everything. There is that lack of coherence.

So, nope. Flipping doesn't make it any better. It's just back to the dead end of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", which in the case of Progressivism vs. Islamism, without the aid of a now destroyed Western Civilization, means really dead.