A wrong basis on which to defend the West: Sexual Liberation

Here is a passage from Oriana Fallaci’s The Rage and the Pride, quoted by Frank Miele of the Daily Inter Lake in northwest Montana, in a column he wrote on the growing Islamic threat:

Wake up, people, wake up! Intimidated as you are by the fear of going against the mainstream, that is to appear racist (a word inappropriate here because we are not discussing race, but religion), you do not understand or don’t want to understand that what is underway here is a Reverse Crusade. … you don’t understand or don’t want to understand that what is in motion here is a religious war. A war that they call Jihad. Holy War. A war that is not after the conquest of our territory, perhaps, but certainly aims to conquer our souls. To the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. To the annihilation of our way of living and of dying, our way of praying or not praying, of our way of eating and drinking and dressing and enjoying ourselves, and informing ourselves…

You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if it is not opposed now, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win. It will destroy the world that good or bad we have managed to create, change, make better and render it a little more intelligent, that is less bigoted or not bigoted at all. With that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morality, values, pleasures… Christ! Don’t you realize that [all these] Osama Bin Ladens consider themselves authorized to kill you and your children because you drink wine or beer, because you don’t wear a long beard or wear a chador, because you go to the theater and the cinema, because you listen to music and sing some songs, because you dance in the discotheques or in your house, because you watch TV, because you wear mini skirts or short pants, because at the beach or pool you’re naked or almost naked, because you make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want? [Emphasis added.]

Don’t you care … even about this, idiots?

While Fallaci’s passionate dread of Islam is exemplary, her description of the Western society she wants to defend from Islam is unfortunate. Virtually making soulless Playboy-style sexual promiscuity her definition of the West, she radically devalues our civilization even as she issues a call to arms for its protection.

Interestingly, the phrases used in Fallaci’s in-your-face demand for sexual freedom—“make it with whom you want, when you want, where you want”—are identical to those used by Jamie Glazov in his recent debate with Dinesh D’Souza. What this kind of language plainly signifies is that any consensual act that people want to perform—wherever and whenever and with whomever they want to perform it—is fine. If they want to commit adultery, or if they want to have group sex, or whatever, that’s fine, and of course homosexual conduct is fine too. That’s what we BELIEVE IN, this is what we ARE, and this is the stand we take against tyrannical Islam.

Fallaci might have said, more modestly, “We as a society leave a large zone of privacy where people can do as they see fit within the bounds of morality.” Instead she suggested that performing any act you want to perform, without any context other than the fact that you want to do it, is GOOD. It seems that Fallaci, even in her later years when illness and death were closing in and she was terrified for the future of our civilization, never went beyond the destructive mentality of the Sexual Revolution, never had any remorse about it, never had any Second Thoughts.

I like Fallaci for her fiery opposition to Islam. I wish thousands more of us, millions more, felt the way she did. But our civilization cannot be preserved on the basis of radical sexual liberation. To the contrary, the modern demand for absolute freedom in the sexual sphere is inseparable from the modern prohibition on any kind of moral or cultural discrimination—and, of course, the latter underlies the open immigration orthodoxy that has allowed into the West the Muslim hordes that so alarmed Fallaci. Sexual freedom and open borders are merely two sides of the same liberal coin. There is no indication that Fallaci understood this.

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A reader writes:

I think “Sexual freedom and open borders are merely two sides of the same liberal coin,” is an overstatement. I’d qualify your “sexual freedom” with words like “public” and “in everyone elses’ faces.”

You may object, “Then anything goes in private?” Well, no, but there I think you’d probably have to be explicit about what line(s) you’re drawing, because there isn’t even common societal agreement on the morality of unmarried adults having routine sexual intercourse.

LA replies:

But doesn’t my whole discussion establish the context of what I mean by “sexual freedom”? I’m speaking of the Sexual Revolution, and not just its original form but as it has metastasized over the last 40 years: all is permitted, and all is publicly allowed, tolerated, and approved.

To criticize the Sexual Revolution as I am doing plainly implies that we should return to traditional morality which says that marriage is the expected and ideal context for sexual relations. At the same time, in the normal course of events, even in the most traditional Western society, there are inevitably going to be things taking place outside marriage. But the society does not give these relationships any public recognition or legitimacy. Marriage remains the accepted standard for society.

Tom S. writes:

I believe that your comments about Oriana Fallaci highlight a deep divide in the leftist camp, one which is only now becoming obvious. On one side of the leftist divide stand those like Fallaci, Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie, Joan Baez, and a few others, who really believed all the propaganda, who thought that leftism was all about freedom and human rights and sexual liberation and racial equality and feminism and joy, who were shocked by Islamic terror and thought it right to fight it. And then there are those who see more clearly, who are not deceived by their own propaganda, the Chomskys, the Moores, the Carters, the myrmidons of the EU and International ANSWER, who know what the true meaning of leftism is.

Leftism was never about freedom—otherwise why were there so few protests when the Communists slaughtered one hundred million people? It was never about human rights—otherwise why were leftists almost silent when the Gulag and Laogai swallowed up their hecatombs? It was never about sexual freedom—else why would the left make de facto common cause with those who bury gays alive, and mutilate women? It was never about racial equality—otherwise the left would not be on the side of the slavers of the Janjaweed in the Sudan, and the murderers of the Kurds. And it was certainly never about joy—if it was, why would so many leftists ally themselves with those who ban music, ban kite flying, and forbid little girls to feel the sun on their faces?

No, leftism has but one purpose, and one purpose only—to destroy the West. Sexual liberation and free speech and feminism and “human rights” and “racial equality” were only battering rams, siege equipment, used to breach the West’s defenses. Having done their job, they can be discarded, leaving the Fallacis standing stunned, saying, in effect, “Why are we abandoning freedom and liberation? Why won’t you fight for them? Isn’t that what we were fighting for all these years?”

No, actually, you were fighting to destroy your civilization. You just didn’t realize it.

Oriana Fallaci had courage, and intelligence, and wit, and insight. It’s too bad that she spent so much of he life tearing down a civilization that she finally, almost too late, realized that she loved.

Kevin O. writes:

Another element to Oriana Fallaci’s flawed, yet surprisingly common, style of exhortation to defend the West is its relationship to the jihadists’ view that we will lose simply because we are afraid to die.

Miss Fallaci refers to skimpy clothing and lust (both private and public, apparently), which have become inextricably associated, at least in recent years, with the concept of the body beautiful. If the satisfaction of lust becomes the pinnacle of achievement within a particular culture, how prepared will that culture be to endure the hardships required to win a war? These hardships may include maiming, facial disfigurement, general privations as a result, for example, of food rationing, and, of course, the ultimate cause of sexual impotence—bodily death. At a time when we need many Hectors to defend the walls of Troy, Fallaci would have inadvertently had us all hiding away like Paris, trying to “make it” upstairs with Helen of Sparta.

Cindy L. writes:

It may be that Oriana Fallaci was trying to appeal to the more decadent or hedonistic within our society to wake up and recognize the threat using the only examples that she thought would get through their thick skulls. If I saw someone doing the equivalent of dancing naked in the street every day and wanted to alert them to a danger that I believed was real but that they refused to acknowledge, I might say to them, “Look, man. At the very least, don’t you enjoy dancing naked in the street every day? Do you want a system that tells you that you can’t dance naked in the street? These people want to take that freedom away from you.” She might have been thinking that such arguments would be more effective than, say, telling them that a continued influx of Muslims into our society means that it’s more and more likely we’re going to see acts of terrorism similar to what goes on in Israel or that our banking system is going to have to do back flips to accommodate their beliefs or that we’re going to have to hear the call to prayers in public five times a day or arrange hotel toilet seats so that they can face Mecca, etc.

Simon Newman writes:

Fallaci: “because at the beach or pool you’re naked or almost naked, because you make it with whom you want…”

Minor point—nudity & promiscuity seems like two different issues to me. While US, UK and (apparently) Italian culture share the Islamic view that strongly associates nudity with sex, visiting France and Germany it seems clear to me that they don’t have the same level of association. French women at the beach, or (some) German women at a lake in the middle of Hamburg, go topless, largely irrespective of age and appearance; from their attitude & those around them it didn’t seem to have a strong sexual connotation.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 02, 2007 08:17 PM | Send