Delaying Tactics

Wretchard, in comparing the "True Believers" of the Left and their reluctance to condemn Communism in the last century; and their more recent reluctance to condemn Osama Bin Laden and the Islamists, makes the following observation:

But more poignant yet was the refusal of some Party members, exiled to Magadan, the worst camp of the Gulag, to smuggle news to their comrades of their fate. One said, 'at least now they still have hope in Communism. If I let them know the truth then they will have nothing'. Even in Magadan the Left's deepest need was to believe. Having abolished the God of their forefathers and finding themselves prostrate before the false god they fashioned for themselves, as between extinction and despair they chose extinction.

This is essentially the same point I made in a post yesterday:

During Vietnam, the media; academics, intellectuals, many public figures, entertainers, and the antiwar protesters of the time consistently and stubbornly refused to see Communism for what it really was. They steadfastly ignored the millions of deaths in the Soviet Union and elsewhere and instead focused their attention on the United States as the center of all evil in the world.

Today we have the very same people consistently and adamantly refusing to acknowledge Islam and the Jihadis for what they are. Again, they prefer to ignore the barbaric ideology that promotes enslavement and death. With tedious and infinitely repetitive talking points, they again subscribe to the comforting notion that the US is the cause of the mayhem and butchery and ignore the real butchers. The deluded women's movement is more interested in forcing science to acknowledge that women are identical to men in every way possible, than they are in helping the women in the Middle East get out from under the oppression of Islam.In other words, the MSM's Vietnam "template" is actually nothing more than that primitive and immature psychological defense mechanism known as DENIAL.
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the Left has consistently perceived America as the threat to the world, and ignored to the point of complete hysterical blindness the real oppressors of human freedom and dignity.

When belief in any idea become a matter of faith--and one's own identity is defined by that faith--then the psyche will do anything necessary to distort or deny any truth that contradicts that belief.

This has nothing to do with reason or logic. In such psychologically devastating situations, reason and logic are frequently trashed so that the belief may be preserved in spite of reality.

Distortion and denial, when used by otherwise mentally healthy individuals, are merely delaying tactics that the psyche uses to give the Self some time to adjust to an uncomfortable reality. Eventually, the truth must be faced if psychological health is to be maintained.

Take a common example that most people can relate to. When informed of bad news--the death of a loved one or something awful that has happened--the immediate reaction for almost all people is to shout, "NO!"--or some other word of denial. There is total and complete disbelief and an unwillingness to accept the truth. This immediate rejection of the truth/reality is actually quite normal.

But, if weeks later, the individual is still maintaining denial and refusing to acknowledge the reality, almost everyone then recognizes that something is dreadfully wrong and concludes that the individual requires some aggressive intervention to return them to mental health. Grief--and reality-- may be exquisitely painful, but experiencing it and working through it is a far better option psychologically and permits a person to truly "move on". Failure to do so can be catastrophic since reality does not honor one's false beliefs.

It is, of course, extremely comforting to believe that your loved one is still alive; or that a tragic event did not happen; that everyone is lying to you and there are conspiracies and plots behind the bad news. But these comforting delusions are embraced at quite a long-term psychological cost to the individual. In the case of the example quoted at The Belmont Club, sometimes extinction is preferred over truth.

I fear that is the choice that those on the Left are making right now, although they like to imagine that those of us who are fighting against the new threats to human freedom and dignity are the ones suffering from delusion. That is an example of yet another delaying tactic called "projection", and sadly--like denial and distortion-- it only works until reality comes crashing down.