Apocalypse on the US blogosphere

2 December 2006

David Selbourne finds no reason and much hate on American blog-sites, where the Left pillories ‘fascists’ and ‘racists’, and the Right attacks Muslims with terrifying verbal brutality

Roughly speaking, the blogging ‘right’ is anti-Muslim (and not just anti-Islam), pro-gun and apple pie, anti-‘big government’ and ‘liberals’ in DC, and generally pro-British, anti-European and pro-Israel; while the ‘left’ is anti-‘extremist’, anti-‘racist’, pro-‘human rights’, anti-militarist, anti-US support for Israel and anti-corporate — the last a position sometimes to be found on the ‘right’ also.

Above all, for most of this ‘right’, all-out war has been declared on ‘the West’ by Islam and its ‘terrorists’. But for most of the ‘left’ and ‘liberals’, war is being imposed on parts of the Islamic world by the Americans, Israelis, and their rag-tag partners in geopolitical ‘crime’, and against whom Muslim ‘radicals’ must be expected to strike back.

The differences between these mutually hostile camps, judging by the blogosphere, are growing. Moreover, as Islam’s political fortunes have advanced, irrationality in response to this advance has spread also, to ‘right’ and ‘left’. Some of it provides light relief. To bloggers on the ‘right’, the ‘left’ are ‘moonbats’, Democrats are sell-out ‘Dhimmicrats’, Saddam Hussein is ‘Sodom Insane’ and the ACLU is the ‘American Criminal Liberties Union’; the ‘left’ describes President Bush as everything from a ‘traitor’ to a ‘boil on the public butt’, and pro-Israel Christian evangelists as ‘fundie nutjobs’.

Other judgements are more serious in their portents. A blog-poster declares that the ‘left’ and ‘liberals’ have ‘done nothing but grovel at the feet of Islamofascists’; another that the entire American ‘left’ — who are no better than ‘tares in the midst of wheat’ — are ‘killing this country’. For their parts, ‘left’ bloggers see the battles in Afghanistan and Iraq as ‘useless’, and the Bush ‘regime’ as having ‘run amok’.

However, ‘left’ and ‘right’ share the perception that it is the other which is in command of the polity and of the ‘MSM’. To the ‘right’, which considers itself ‘pretty much shut out of our national corporate media’, ‘what could not be accomplished on the battlefield — an American retreat from Iraq — was instead achieved in American newsrooms’. To the ‘left’, a ‘right-wing machine’ which includes ‘experts who have sold out to it’ and ‘hateful right-wing talkshows’ rules the waves.