I think I’ve discovered the short, pithy phrase that sums up the thinking of the left worldwide. In church and state, from campus to coffee shop, covering the whole range of IQs and every creed and color.

It’s actually from a movie: “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.” See it in context below:

 

 
Leftists want you to accept their talking points, to cringe and surrender your principles and beat your breast on command. They surround their demands with all the sound and fury that the Wizard of Oz could summon. But they don’t appreciate it when you look beyond the surface. Or ask too many questions. They especially resent it when you try to draw analogies, or sift out the operative principle they’re asking you to act on.

That’s much too human and rational a response to those who rely on dog-whistles, pats on the head, and shock collars in our obedience training. Try pushing back, and you’ll elicit tears of incomprehension, spasms of rage, or vicious ad hominem attacks.

Since I find all that funny, their tactics don’t work on me. I’ll sit back and chuckle when supposedly smart adults use arguments on me that boil down to “Down, Zmirak, down! Bad Zmirak! Bad!! Dontcha want a liver snap? Dontcha, dontcha? Or do I have to whack your snout?”

I could adduce examples from now till the end of the world.

Don’t Think, Just Quick, Obey!

For instance, leftists will show you sad-looking pictures of illegal immigrants, cropped to just show the children, looking through bars or fences with cute little liquid brown eyes. Then they’ll demand: “Is this what Jesus said to do to children? Well it’s what your Donald Trump does! And you call yourself a Christian. …”

If you try to ask any questions about why those people broke our laws, whether they really deserve “political asylum” from their own native countries, how their arrival will affect the poorest Americans, or whether we’re obliged to admit every immigrant on earth who wants to come. …

The Wizard pushes the “thunder” button. You find yourself called a racist. Or accused of “heartless calculation” and “cynical bean-counting” for daring, well … to think. Whenever somebody tries to stop you from thinking, of course, there’s a very good reason. He knows that rationality is not on his side. He wants to master you like a pet, not reason together as people.

Even intellectuals employ this kind of tactic, because it works. Too often, anyway. Most of us are busy, sociable, and would rather be liked than hated. So if the price of resisting moral dog training is that we’re kicked out of the pack, condemned and labeled, too often we’ll just obey.

The White Guilt Dog Whistle

Let me use a slightly more sophisticated instance of leftist dog-training—one which calls upon us to do a little more digging. The Pluralist reports:

A British architect came under fire for his “modest proposal,” in which he suggested replacing the Notre-Dame de Paris Cathedral spire with a “graceful minaret” as a memorial to the “approximately 100 Algerians who were killed by the French police while protesting the Algerian War in 1961.”

Now that has a nice, pious sound to it. It’s designed to make those who object sound like heartless monsters. Who among us approves of policemen killing protesters? Which of us wants Western nations to impose colonial regimes on Muslim countries?

If you sputter with anger at the very idea of mutilating a great Christian place of worship and work of art with some alien creed’s main emblem. … Why, that’s a great way to get labeled a “xenophobe” or “Islamophobe, or even a “white nationalist.” Get tarred with that, and you might be punched as a “Nazi,” fired from your job, or unpersoned on social media.

Questions You’re Not Supposed to Ask

What you’re not supposed to do at this point is ask any questions. But I never do what I’m ordered to, and I’ve got a great big callus around my neck where the shock collar goes. So I’m going to ask some anyway:

• Did the Archbishop of Paris, or the Catholic church, kill those Algerian protesters? Well, no. In fact it was the secular government, which stole all the churches in 1905.
• Did the Catholic church colonize Algeria in the first place? Again, no. It was the French state that did that.
• So why punish the church instead of the state? Why not stick some great big honking minaret on top of a secular, state monument like Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe?

At this point you’ve made an enemy, because you’ve won the argument. And that’s against the rules. You’re clearly a very bad dog, who won’t get any liver snaps.

Why not be even worse? Ask some further questions, like this one:

Why did France colonize Algeria in the first place?

It wasn’t for national greatness, or to hijack valuable resources. Frankly, Algeria didn’t have any back in 1830, when France invaded. Crude oil was seen as a nuisance, and France had plenty of sand. No, the French King Charles X invaded Algeria for a real and urgent reason: To stop the 1,000-year-old practice of Arabs sailing around the Mediterranean, landing on European shores, kidnapping Christians and selling them as slaves. (The women were usually sex slaves, the men put to grueling work — unless of course, they converted to Islam to win their freedom.)

Remember what Muhammad told his followers: They were limited to just four wives. But they could have concubines, which meant non-Muslim women whom they had captured. The only limit on those was how many they could control.

We saw the members of ISIS revive that practice in Syria, capturing, trading, and raping Christian and Yezidi women. Well, the Algerians had been doing just that by sea since the Muslims conquered the country. Remember the “Barbary Pirates,” America’s enemy in our first war post-Independence? They were the naval branch of the Muslim slave and rape trade.

Occupying the country, the French judged, was the only way to finally stop it. Once they’d established the place as a colony, the French stuck around, as nations do. You know, the way the Turks stuck around in Hungary, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Romania and Serbia, for several hundred years. 

How About a Cross on the Mosque in Algiers?

How many Christians were enslaved by Muslim pirates, over the centuries? The latest scholarly estimate is at least one million.

So let’s think again about that architect’s proposal. Instead of a minaret on top of Notre Dame commemorating 100 protestors, maybe we need the largest mosque in Algeria topped with a really huge cross, in honor of one million Christians victimized over centuries, in accord with Muslim practice.

See all you can learn when you insist on looking behind the curtain? But you’ll never get any liver snaps.