Sigmund Freud said in 1919 that Woodrow Wilson had entered that psychic fantasy land, when Wilson was trying to get the Treaty of Versailles approved and calling that dastardly pact (which helped bring Hitler to power) things like “the incomparable consummation of the hopes of mankind.”
I hold no brief for Freud, but it seems to me that the whole world today has become Woodrow Wilson, exchanging wishes for fact: sure that the vast majority of peaceful, law-abiding Muslims are behind anti-terror efforts in the West; sure that moderate Islam both exists and will easily defeat the jihadists intellectually and theologically within the Muslim community; sure that the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza will bring peace to our time; sure that if we just don’t talk about the problems within Islam, this will somehow encourage and empower genuine moderate Muslims — wish after wish, each as fantastic and as divorced from reality as the last.
Wilson, said Freud, was “rapidly approaching that psychic land from which few travelers return, the land in which facts are the products of wishes, in which friends betray and in which an asylum chair may be the throne of God…”
By contrast: “The man who faces facts, however unpleasant they may be, preserves his mental integrity.”
Thank you, Dr. Freud, for your certification of our “mental integrity” here at Jihad Watch, where we are interested only in facing facts.
And thanks also to Dr. Thomas Woods, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, from which I took these Freud quotes. Woods’ book, of course, is the first in the series in which my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) is the second.