You Better Hope You Fail

Exclusive commentary by Greg Lewis / WashingtonDispatch.com
November 4, 2003

I've got one thing to say to leftists and Islamists in America who are looking forward to the day they somehow manage to overthrow the United States government: You damn well better hope you fail!

You damn well better hope there never comes a time when the United States and the political freedom and the economic opportunity and the environment of religious tolerance she stands for no longer grace this planet. Because if that day ever comes, you and your families and your fellow citizens of this wonderful country will very likely be mercilessly trampled under the heels of a tyrannical dictatorship the like of which you cannot conceive, unless you happen to be fortunate enough to read and give credence to the writings of contemporary conservative commentators.

You on the left, in your ignorance and naiveté — perhaps you are or have recently been on the receiving end of the leftist brainwashing that passes for education in America's institutions of "higher" learning — have no idea of the reality of living in a totalitarian society. Nor do you seem to be able to comprehend that the leftist, absolutist politics you so readily and so undiscerningly espouse are in fact totalitarian politics.

You don't seem to realize, for instance, that Islam — the religion which you unquestioningly elevate to a position superior to that of Christianity or Judaism — is, for all practical purposes and to the detriment of more than a billion of your fellow human beings, under the pernicious control of small groups of Islamist radicals who subvert the teachings of the Qu'ran to justify the most heinous and bloodthirsty practices in the name of establishing a universal Islamist theocracy.

In other words, they're working — with your tacit approval — to subjugate the world under a legal system based on Sharia, the brutal and inhuman Islamic code of law which would disenfranchise all women and all people who are not of the Muslim faith. I'm here to tell you, radical Islam does not stand for tolerance and religious freedom. You don't seem to realize, in your blind and unthinking dismissal of truly democratic institutions and practices, that you're implicitly supporting people who are among the most intolerant and unenlightened and bloodthirsty would-be tyrants the world has ever known.

But, of course, your education has most likely included almost no exposure whatsoever to the western liberal thought of the past 300 years or so, not to mention the early Greek and Judaeo-Christian philosophy upon which such thought is founded. Nor do you realize — especially if you're a college student, but also if you're a citizen who gets his or her "news" primarily from a local newspaper or from a big-three network newscast — that the "news" to which you are exposed (or, since there are alternatives out there, to which you passively allow yourself to be exposed by not exercising your right to choose your news source) is inordinately and undeniably slanted in favor of a leftist political agenda, that there's not a chance in a million that you'll ever hear or read an unbiased report about any political issue of import.

The fact is that Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings are being "outed," exposed for what they are: aging, out-of-touch leftists who, because they exist in a kind of corporate ivory tower, surrounded by sycophants and yes-men (oops, yes-people), have been able to perpetrate what amounts to nothing less than journalistic fraud on the American viewing public. To think that more than 20 million Americans each evening actually tacitly accept (because the simple act of "tuning in" makes them, as members of the network news audience, complicit in the fraud perpetrated by the big-three networks) a leftist point-of-view.

Indeed, the fact that tens of millions of Americans actually buy into the desiccated radical leftist blather of these three "newsmen" will, within a decade, be looked at with incredulity by social historians. These historians will no doubt couch their accounts of the history of the early 21st century through which we're now living in an embarrassed chuckle: "Unh, well, you see, for some reason a lot of people didn't catch on to the fact that the world was changing and that Dan and Tom and Peter were clinging desperately to — I know this is hard to believe — to an outmoded 'socialist' agenda, and that the so-called 'news' these three delusional celebrities reported actually amounted to nothing more than selected world events filtered through the screen of an embarrassingly broad and undiscerning, not to say uncritical, leftist agenda."

In the unthinkable event that some sort of radical leftist or Islamist victory over democracy should occur, you would quickly realize that you were accessories after the fact to the demise of the most truly humane and inclusive and benevolent system of government ever brought forth on this planet. The only problem is that by then it would be too late for you to recant your position, to take back your implicit support of the forces of tyranny and despotism.

Isn't it clear by now that — despite what the commentary of Rather, Brokaw, and Jennings every evening between 6:30 and 7:00 EST would lead you to believe — governments formed on Marxist principles (on which principles the aforementioned "newsmen" base their biased and critical reporting of the news) have demonstrated Marxism to be capable of supporting nothing more than brutal, murderous totalitarian regimes? The fact is that Marxist and Islamist regimes (Marxists and Islamists are philosophical bedfellows, their repressive agendas for all practical purposes identical, with the exception of the Islamists' "religious" foundations) suppress every positive and worthwhile human impulse, from the desire to freely worship a Supreme Being, to the desire of all humans to further their personal interests and those of their families, to the desire of men and women to realize through their creative impulses and talents the infinite ways in which human beings can manifest the spark of the Divine that informs each of us.

It is these fundamental impulses that democratic capitalistic societies allow (not to say encourage) to flourish, just as it is these fundamental impulses that societies founded on Marxist and Islamist principles inevitably suppress. It is only in western democratic societies that humans are afforded the opportunities to truly explore their humanity, to plumb the depths and to ascend the heights of human consciousness unfettered. And so to all of you who, by your support of the ascendancy of leftism in its many insidious guises, of political and religious absolutists who would reduce humanity to the level of their limited vision, I repeat my words: You damn well better hope you fail!