Apocalypse on the US blogosphere

30 November 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

Paranoia and odium are on the increase. In the blogosphere, the word ‘fascist’ is thus routinely used by the ‘left’ to describe the ‘right’ of all shades — the White House, for example, is said to be ‘gripped by a fascist power lust’. The ‘right’, whose spelling is less good, not only regards Islamists as ‘facists’ but also those on the ‘left’ whom it accuses of sympathising with America’s foes.

But nothing can compare with the ‘right’s’ abuse of ‘Muzzies’ in general. They are variously said to be ‘dumber than dirt’, ‘godless savages’, ‘losers’, even ‘Koranimals’. As for Islam, or ‘Islamania’, it is (for example) a ‘misogynistic genocidal cult’ which allegedly worships a ‘false pagan moon-rock god of death’ and is ‘eating at the insides of every nation until it is dead’.

Of course, there are distinguished precedents even for the bleakest and coarsest of these judgements. To Montesquieu in 1748, Islam’s ‘destructive spirit’ spoke ‘only by the sword’; to Schopenhauer in 1819, the Koran was a ‘wretched book’ in which he had ‘not been able to discover one single idea of value’; to De Tocqueville in 1843, Islam was ‘deadly’, ‘to be feared’ and a ‘form of decadence’.

Today, however, it is the sheer violence of emotion on blog-sites which is most striking. The true patriot would seize American ‘appologists [sic] for Islam’, ‘hold them with their feet to the fire until they are screaming, and watch them squirm’; while a ‘liberal’ voice yells into the ether that those who have supported the war in Iraq ‘should not be given a chance to breathe. Pound them into the ground until they never get back up, evil bastards!’