Learning from David Solway’s insights about Islam and Western leftism

One of the most perplexing things about today’s leftists, who currently have a death grip on Western politics and culture, is the cognitive dissonance that sees them embrace ideas at complete variance with reality. That’s why it’s fascinating to read an interview with David Solway, a writer, philosopher, and teacher. The author of (most recently) Crossing the Jordan: On Judaism, Islam, and the West, offers insights about the West’s fatal love affair with Islam, the inevitable failures of socialism, or dangerous schisms within Judaism, you will learn something.

One of Solway’s more interesting points is about the nature of memory, leftism, and modern culture. Yesterday, I wrote that MSN.com’s AI algorithm has decided that the name of one of America’s greatest comic actors is an obscenity that must be redacted. The memory of the forbidden word must be erased, and anything that gets caught as that word swirls down history’s drain is just collateral damage. In light of that, Solway’s response to the question from Mark Tapson (who conducted the interview) about Islam’s attack on memory was striking.

MT:     In “Islam’s War on the Past,” you warn that “the barbaric iconoclasts of Islam” are undertaking an “initiative against the collective memory of the West.” Why is this “murder of the past,” as you put it, of “astronomical significance”?

DS:     You recall what Orwell said in 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Memory is the issue. In his extraordinary book The Open Past: Subjectivity and Remembering in the Talmud, Sergey Dolgopolski points out that the modern practice of memory is confined to providing data—which can be easily falsified—whereas the rabbis viewed memory as furnishing insight into thinking about the past in such a way as to emulate the Divine, that is, in its human form, as a moral commitment to truth. This is what we might call Talmudic memory, using all the tools at our disposal—textual analysis, the intuition of spirit rather than ideological exigency, the conviction that understanding the past, both individual and historical, striving to remember it rather than using or abusing it for ulterior purposes, is instrumental in creating your personhood.

Otherwise, you are simply a reified nothing. Extinction is the next step. Without personal memory, you are a mere cipher. In the absence of historical memory, a civilization has no identity, no ground on which to base and defend its existence. Ban books. Topple monuments.  Censor information. Invent alternate realities. Fudge statistics. Provide data without context or meaning. Seize and destroy archeological artifacts. Perform what I called in my Education Lost a chronosectomy—excise the organ of memory, and you have won the war against a free and productive society. You have, in effect, conquered the Judeo-Christian West.

That’s just one snippet of a wide-ranging question-and-answer conversation with an intelligent interrogator and a brilliant thinker. Along the way, Solway examines the psychology of ordinary Westerners—not the calculating socialists manipulating society but the regular people—who cheerfully embrace Islam notwithstanding its hostility to everything they’ve been taught to value.

He also looks at why some societies flourish and others fail—and yet Islam, despite attributes that should ensure its failure, continues to flourish over the centuries. The problem for the West is that as Western-style socialism both flows and inevitably ebbs, it will have removed all the bulwarks that can protect it from an ideology that is so completely totalitarian and violent that it relentlessly propels itself forward through space and time.

Lastly, Solway, looking through the perspective of both religion and history, examines why it is that Jews (my People) are always their own worst enemies. In some ways, that was the most interesting part of the discussion for me, especially when he looked at the phenomenon of anti-Israel Jews who happily side with the people who seek to destroy them.

All in all, Solway has much to offer those grappling with the incoherence of today’s West, which offers nothing and has convinced ordinary people to embrace policies that will inevitably destroy them.

Image: Amazon.