The ideological cause of the Benghazi bungles

When Pizarro hit the Incas, they just could not see him unless he got in their faces and started poking swords into them. They could not see him, because they could not believe in him.

The attack on the Benghazi embassy was not a terrorist attack. It was a conventional military operation by the uniformed and well equipped troops of an organization that frequently engages in terrorist attacks. They used truck mounted artillery, not box cutters, and were dressed as Al Qaeda armed forces, not civilians. If you cannot say “War with Dar al-Islam”, or even say “War with Radical Islam”, you cannot see Islamic armed forces.

No one seems able to say “uniformed”. They say that they were wearing “Afghan costumes”. But no one in Libya wears “Afghan” costumes except armed forces affiliated with Al Qaeda, thus the costumes clearly identify them as members of an organized military force, which is the Geneva Convention definition of a military uniform.

So Al Qaeda launched a conventional military attack on the US government, and the US government refused to fight back. That was scandal one. Scandal two was that the US government proceeded to lie about it, to fit it into what they wanted to believe, rather than what actually happened. Hence the cover story that the attack was a demonstration related to a video critical of Mohammed – that it was outraged civilians, or perhaps terrorists hiding amongst outraged civilians and using them as human shields.

This lie was not only intended to cover up the first scandal, but to enable them to continue to believe in a worldview that had been falsified by events. They lied to themselves, as well as to their opponents.

This is akin to the fact crimestop prevents progressives from seeing reactionary propaganda, most famously in “District 9” Reactionaries are taking advantage of progressive crimestop, and Al Qaeda is taking advantage of progressive crimestop.

Shawn Turner, spokesman for Mr Clapper’s office, said that in the immediate aftermath of the attack, US agencies came to the view that the Benghazi attack had begun spontaneously after protests at the US embassy in Cairo against a short film made in California lampooned the Prophet Mohammed.

Mr Turner said that as US intelligence learnt more about the attack, “we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organised terrorist attack carried out by extremists”.

He said it remained “unclear” if any individual or specific group commanded the attack.

The lie drifts slightly closer to the truth, without any danger of making contact.

Progressives reacted to the 9/11 attack as an opportunity to invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and convert them to … progressivism

As Moldbug sarcastically tells us, progressivism is a superior revelation of which Christianity and Islam, along with all other religions, is a mere anticipation, a kind of lame-ass John-the-Baptist point-the-way figure. Backward people who refuse to accept this inevitable transition are called “fundamentalists”. If they do accept it, they are “moderates” or some other term of approbation.

There is a fair bit of “moderate Islam” in the US, meaning preachers who preach progressivism to a rapidly emptying mosque while calling themselves Muslims, for in the US the full power of the state can be applied to bend preachers to the will of the state. Progressives believe that there is a fair bit of “moderate Islam” in the middle east, but they are deluded. From time to time Obama (himself a “moderate Muslim”) has embraced some Muslim preacher as prince of moderation, only to later add that preacher to the list of people that assassin drones are to kill on sight. Obama seems to be waking up the fact that “moderate Muslims” are as thin on the ground as shovel ready government projects. This, however, puts Obama well to the right of the Department of State, and indeed well to the right of most neoconservatives.

Because progressives are unaware how much coercion they apply to convert people subject to the rule of the USG to progressivism, they profoundly under estimated how much violence would be required to convert the middle east. Thus they were, and are, in denial about what happened in Benghazi. The new regime in Libya was supposedly progressive, thus unthinkable that some military units of the Libyan spring were in fact Al Qaeda, unthinkable that they were in state of conventional war, declared by both sides, with the USA. Official truth was and is that there was no significant Al Qaeda presence among the rebels against Gaddafi’s regime, hence the inability to recognize “Afghan” clothes for what they were. The failure to respond to a military attack, and the subsequent lies and cover up, are all in an effort to uphold official truth, all in an effort to believe official truth.