[Skybird]

I think it is more precise to diagnose "autophobia", a fear of one'S own identity and fearing to stand up in defence of it. The "xenophobia" some may feel indeed (racists, not islam critics) is just a superficial symptom of that psychosis the author diagnoses, but at the heart of that psychosis lies a very strong autophobia, if not self-hate.

The German essay that I linked yesterday and did not translate due to its length, also argues like that. It's author, a psychiatrist and theologist, points out the strict polarisation between good and evil that this thing called political correctness now aggressively enforces in our societies, defining what is acceptable to say and to think and to do, and what people nowadays must be burned at the stake for in thought, statement and behavior. This is expression of the deep uncertainity that dominates our people's minds that no longer are allowed to ground on traditional identities and value systems basing on a long history and identity-forming. Our old identity feeling, our identification with our culture and history, have been deconstructed and destroyed, the old standards and scale have been destroyed, disorientation is the consequence, and this leads to the totalitarian dictate of standards as defined by poltiical correctness. But PC is just the garbage that got sucked in by the vacuum we have allowed to be created inside of our communities. That we did this, has several reasons, the second world war may have a role here, the reoirentation towards total comuerism and materialsm denying noin-material values, the merciless competition race the individual has to survive today, and the relativisation of the influence of the churches' role and the Christian dogma.

The West is a hollow torso. a vaccum is filled by what before was outside the system. Islam happened to stand close by whwere before it was actively fought back since centuries, and political correctness is just something like the reacxtion of an immune-system turning against the hosting organism by mistake, because the host does not identify its own legitimate identity anymore.