The Galloway Syndrome: What Am I Missing?

George Galloway, as quoted byMEMRI:

"The real question is, after the evidence of Sykes-Picot 1, are you ready to accept Sykes-Picot 2? What does Sykes-Picot mean to the Arab world? Nothing except division, disunity, weakness, and failure. Two of your beautiful daughters are in the hands of foreigners - Jerusalem and Baghdad. The foreigners are doing to your daughters as they will. The daughters are crying for help, and the Arab world is silent. And some of them are collaborating with the rape of these two beautiful Arab daughters. Why? Because they are too weak and too corrupt to do anything about it. So this is what Sykes-Picot will do to the Arabs. Are you ready to have another hundred years like the hundred years you just had?"

Not only is this jaw-droppingly stupid, but there was a time when incitement against your own country, especially during a war, would have gotten you drawn and quartered. Not that a return to such barbarity is warranted, but there was a reason for it. Thomas Hobbes saw that the primal fear was the fear of violent death at the hands of one's fellow man, and that it is this fear which is the source of the "enlightened self interest" that motivates us to bond together to create and maintain civil order and to defend against external enemies. It is this that made treason the most heinous of all crimes. And he also rightly reasoned that the further we stray from a coherent connection to that primal fear, the more corrupt and vain we may become, and therefore the less likely to maintain those bonds that ensure security from the "state of nature." If Galloway and others are able to easily avoid the consequences of such "speech" (and if it's not seditious, I don't know what is) it will become an entrenched tradition among the disconnected and self-annihilating wishful thinkers of the West. But it still strikes us as more a matter of pathetic mental illness than corruption, because for most of us the assets of civilization are still more tangible than our fantasies.

(Cross-posted by Demosophist to Demosophia, Anticipatory Retaliation and The Jawa Report)