Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler   

Friday, 14 October 2005

[This is the text of a speech Dr. Jack Wheeler gave October 13, 2005, at the Accuracy in Media luncheon in Washington DC. It was taped by C-Span and was nationally broadcast at various times over the C-Span network.  Dr. Wheeler began the speech by holding up an actual shrunken head.]

I’d like to show you a concrete example of why liberals cannot defend their country. This is a human shrunken head.

It was made by the man who gave it to me, Chief Tangamashi, who adopted me into his clan of Shuara Jivaros in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador when I was 16 years old. The Jivaros call such a shrunken head a tsantsa.

When an enemy is killed in battle, his head is taken via a machete and skinned. The head skin is sewn up and hot sand stuffed in the cavity, drawing out all the moisture and oils until it is dried and shrunken.

For some time before this process, the head-taker has studied his trophy’s facial features, so that as the tsantsa dries and becomes plastic, it can be shaped to look like its owner when alive. This is done so that the spirit of the man killed will recognize his home when a ceremony is held at the head-taker’s village, the tsantsa placed on a pole, and the spirit called in from the forest.

The uvisheen or witch-doctor has the spirit enter his home - his head - then traps it inside by sewing up the lips. By trapping the spirit inside a head shrunken in size, the spirit’s power to do malevolent magic is equally shrunken and is incapacitated.

The spirit, which entered through the tsantsa’s lips can only escape through the lips which are sewn up. Notice that the tsantsa is hollow, that the neck hole is open - but somehow it’s no fair for the spirit to escape through the open neck.

Now, what would lead the Jivaros to engage in such a practice as shrinking human heads? Because they believe that all death is murder. All death that is accidental or unexplained is for them murder by envious black magic, which must be avenged.

The Jivaros, like most primitive and traditional cultures, live in constant fear of the magical aggression of others. They attribute all unfortunate events to the malicious, envious black magic of another Jivaro. (Sounds like the Democrats blaming everything on George Bush, right?)

In another part of the Amazon there is a tribe called the Yanomamo. When a Yanomamo woman gives birth, she tearfully proclaims her child to be ugly.

In a loud mortified lament that the entire tribe can hear, she asks why the gods have cursed her with such a pathetically repulsive infant. She does this in order to ward off the envious black magic of the Evil Eye, the Mal Ojo, that would be directed at her by her fellow tribespeople if they knew how happy she was with her beautiful baby.

People in tribal and traditional cultures suffuse their lives with superstition, witchcraft, sorcery, voodoo, "black magic," the "evil eye." The world for them is teeming with demons, spirits, ghosts and gods, all of whom are malicious and dangerous -- in a word, envious.

Envy is the source of tribal and traditional cultures’ belief in Black Magic, the fear of the envious Evil Eye. The fundamental reason why certain cultures remain static and never evolve (like present-day villages in Egypt or India that have pretty much stayed the same for a thousand years) is the overwhelming extent to which the entire lives of the people within them are dominated by envy and envy-avoidance.

Just like the culture of the Left today, which represents a philosophy of the Stone Age. For the Left is fundamentally characterized by a resentment of prosperity -- and all forms of such resentment - from the leftist university professor who considers himself to be in the progressive vanguard of sophisticated contemporary thought to the terrorist in a cave wanting to take us all back to the Dark Ages -- are nothing but an atavism, a regression to a primitive tribal belief in Black Magic.

Take for example the primitive atavism of left-wing bromides like "the rich get richer while the poor get poorer." By the same logic, one can be healthy only at the expense of others. That in order to be in superior health, bursting with energy and vitality, one has to make someone else sick or in poor health -- just like in order to be rich you have to make others poor.

The healthy are healthy because they unjustly exploited and ripped off the sick, spiriting away the sick’s fair share of health with black magic. In fact, the sick are sick because the healthy are healthy. If this is absurd, then claiming the poor are poor because they have been exploited by the rich is equally so.

The crux understanding of Moslem terrorism or Jihadism, for example, is that it is a pathology of envy.

All three of the great barbarisms of modern times have been pathologies of envy. Naziism, preaching race-envy toward "rich exploitative Jews"; Communism preaching class-envy toward "rich exploitative capitalists"; Jihadism preaching culture-envy toward "rich exploitative America/Israel/the West." In all three cases, the belief in exploitation is a primitive belief in voodoo Black Magic.

What gives envy its enormous destructive capacity is the fear of it, fear of the Evil Eye. It is envy that makes a Nazi, a Communist, or a Moslem Terrorist. It is the fear of being envied that makes a Liberal.

This is most easily seen in the children of wealthy parents. Successful businessmen who have made it on their own normally have a respect for the effort and the economic system that makes success possible. Their children, with their unearned inheritance, are easier targets for guilt-mongering by the envious.

So they assume a posture of liberal compassion as an envy-deflection device: "Please don't envy me for my father's money -- look at all the liberal causes and government social programs I advocate!" Teddy Kennedy is the archetype of this phenomenon.

Envy-appeasement explains why Hollywood is so liberal. The vast amounts of money entertainment stars make is so grossly disproportionate to the effort it took them to make it that they feel it is unearned. So they apologize for it. The Liberal strategy is to apologize for his success, his country’s success, his civilization’s success, in order to appease the envious.

Liberalism is thus not a political ideology or set of beliefs. It is an envy-deflection device, a psychological strategy to avoid being envied. Liberalism is the politicalization of envy-appeasement.

One definitive characteristic of both envy and the fear of it is masochism. Envy is not simply hatred of someone for having something you don't -- it is the willingness to masochistically hurt or deprive yourself as long as the person you are envious of is also hurt or deprived. The penultimate example is the Palestinian suicide-bomber.

Similarly, the more one fears being envied, the more one is driven to masochistic self-humiliation in attempts at envy appeasement.

The lethality of liberal envy-appeasement is that personally-felt guilt is projected onto the various social or tribal collectives to which the liberal belongs and are a part of his self-identity. Self-loathing is transformed into a loathing of one's society or race.

White male liberals become auto-sexist, sexist toward their own sex. White liberals become auto-racist: racist toward their own race (such as white writer Susan Sontag who denounced her own race as "the cancer of human history").

Dime-store demagogues like eco-fascist environmentalists, feminazis, PETA animal rights fanatics, homosexual marriage promoters, race hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton all get their strength from the liberals' fear of their Evil Eyes.

All the passions of the Left are frenzies of masochism. What could be more idiotic and masochistic than to oppose missile defense? This opposition cannot be understood unless one dispenses with its rhetoric and rationales and realizes that such folks at their emotional core do not want their country defended.

The "global warming" hoax cannot be comprehended other than that its masochistic advocates do not want their civilization to prosper.

The entire Political Correctness movement is nothing but masochistic envy-appeasement advocated by those who do not want their culture to survive.

The pro-abortionists’ crazed determination to prevent any attempt to stop mothers from murdering their children by the millions, or the equally crazed mission of the environmentalists to prevent DDT from saving millions of children from dying of malaria, means that they do not want their species to exist.

As the Amazon tribeswoman who says her baby is ugly, so the white male liberal says his gender, his race, his country, his civilization and even his entire species is ugly.

This is why liberals always root for those who revile America. Liberals are incapacitated from being able to defend America because of their primitive fear of the Evil Eye of America’s enemies. Liberals are incapable of pride, deep pride, in being American. Instead they feel embarrassment.

You and I feel that pride. You and I think it is the coolest thing in the world to be American. I’ve been to some 180 countries, and whenever and wherever someone asks me, "Where are you from?", it is just so totally cool to answer, "America -- I’m an American."

Liberals are embarrassed rather than proud to be American, they want to apologize for being American, to wallow in the goo of moral relativism and multiculturalism, because they have a compulsion to appease the envious.

Yet we cannot defeat Moslem terrorism unless we reject Moslem envy. Such rejection then enables us to target the Jihadis’ numerous Achilles Heels.

One, for example, is women’s rights. It needs to be stated publicly by public figures for consumption in Moslem media: We just don’t care that men having more rights than women is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran, any more than we care that slavery is so sanctioned. If slavery and lack of women’s rights is sanctioned by Allah in the Koran, then too bad for Allah.

We need to go on the moral offensive. The moral currency of Islam is debased. Islam is infected with a moral virus that has rendered it a morally inferior religion as it stands in the world today. It no longer deserves our respect and if Moslems want our respect back they must earn it by disinfecting their religion of moral poison.

Such a moral offensive requires moral confidence. Not only are liberals are incapable of moral confidence (with one exception: the sacred right of a mother to murder her unborn children), they are terrified of it, claiming it to be the path to tyranny.

Yet moral relativism was Benito Mussolini’s rationale for fascism:

If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and those who claim to be the bearers of objective immortal truth, then there is nothing more relativistic than Fascist attitudes and activity. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, we Fascists conclude that we have the right to create our own ideology and to enforce it with all the energy of which we are capable.

Moral relativism, the denial of moral truths, is the primary rationale for fascism, yet liberals remain terrified of moral certainty and confidence because they are so terrified of envious Evil Eyes.

It was 20 years ago that I realized Liberal Envy-Appeasement was why liberals couldn’t be proud to be American and had no passion for defending Western Civilization.

Back in the 1980s, I often spoke at colleges about anti-Soviet resistance movements in Soviet colonies such as Nicaragua, Angola, Mozambique, and Afghanistan. Students would invariably attempt to turn a discussion of Soviet imperialism into an assertion of moral equivalence between the USA and the USSR: "How can you criticize the Soviets when we're just as bad?" I would be asked. "What about what we did to the Indians?"

I would reply, "I haven't done anything to the Indians. What have you done to them?"

The response was always the same. "But we stole their land!"

And I’d say, "OK -- let's give it back. And let's start with your property. To what tribe do you want your family’s home to go? What tribe gets your car and your stereo?"

Once I couldn't stand being heckled by a particularly loud and petulant student leftist any longer. I lost my temper and said to him: "Look, man, if you're into masochism, find some chick with long black hair who's into whips and chains and have her beat the hell out of you. Just don't take it out on your country."

This is the request we must make to Liberal Democrats today. Stop taking out your need for mortification upon your country. Flagellate yourselves all you want -- just get out of the way of those of us who are proud to be Americans, and stop trying to prevent us from defending the greatest political achievement in the history of humanity -- our country, the United States of America.