The Suicidalist Legacy
Continuing the analysis of Suicidalism and its effects on the West, begun in "Suicidalism" (earlier today, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/184945.html#cutid1):
From Armed and Dangerous, "Gramiscian Damage," http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260.
The Soviet disinformation campaign worked spectacularly well, despite the fact that the Soviets lost the Cold War:
The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.
Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people - at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.
Resisting them is much easier if one has a historiograhic context: if one is aware of what earlier societies believed and why, so that one grasps just how abnormally self-destructive is this disinformational legacy. The Right here has the advantage, as I argued in "Blindness to Cultural Versus Blindness to Biological Deep Time" (http://jordan179.livejournal.com/184786.html), because (now quoting myself)
The Left is essentiallly ignorant of cultural "deep time," which is to say of any history outside their personal memories. History and the people in it may be memorized as sets of disconnected data points or used as examples in this or that polemic, but it is not to be understood as a whole, nor lessons drawn from it, nor the opinions of individuals who lived in the past to be judged in the context of their times, let alone taken "seriously" (notice the "dead" part of "dead white males" -- simply having lived long ago is taken as a disqualification of one's arguments!)
If you read debates on social issues, or works on history, sociology or politics written before the Suicidalist memes became common, you can see just how bizarre those incorporating such memes actually are.
Returning to Armed and Dangerous:
Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.
And how bizarre is that? There is, after all, an "American way of life," just as there is a "French way of life" or a "Japanese way of life" or an "Australian Aboriginal way of life" -- why should we see the American way of life as being an ironic concept? This is also reinforced by an unconscious "only America is real" attitude, of course: if "the American way of life" is simply vanilla normality, then the quotes would make sense.
The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.
And note the extent to which the implications of the Venona transcripts for the Rosenberg, Hiss and other Early Cold War spy cases are ignored in popular histories. Note how many books still talk as if there was still any doubt of the guilt of the Rosenbergs or of Alger Hiss, despite the fact that we now pretty much know for sure that they were conscious and deliberate traitors.
While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.
Making it harder for us to defeat the Islamists in an organized and humane fashion, which would be well within our power if our own internal enemies weren't sabotaging the war effort. This leaves us with two hideous alternatives, as we will see a bit later in this post.
Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE.
Indeed, to a true intellectual Marxist, this would be anathema. The Islamists represent a degree of primitive superstition not to be found in most modern Christian sects, and one which is profoundly not merely anti-liberal but also anti-Communist. Reflect on how Osama bin Laden got his start -- fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980's. The Islamists are no friends to the Western Left, and the Western Left cannot make them its friends by stroking them.
In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon - it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive.
As witness Stalin's own destruction of Russia's own brain trust, the Old Bolsheviks. Stalin wanted to ensure that there was no principle in the Soviet Union save blind worship of himself as The Leader, and thus made Communism as much as possible merely a blind force of destruction, which Stalin could aim this way and that to destroy his enemies of the moment.
This happens in every Communist revolution, because Communism has no checks on the power of whoever winds up being the Leader. If a given Leader is too scrupulous to use his power in this fashion, he eventually falls and is replaced by a Leader less scrupulous. It's fairly inevitable.
The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.
Again, I reference my own "Why Do Leftists Like Islamic Terrorists So Much?" (June 5th, 2007, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/20826.html ), for the way in which the Left has lost faith in its own capacity to achieve anything positive, and become merely a force for nihilistic hatred.
The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating.
And enlightening. It gives one at least part of the explanation of why the Left is so poor at defending its ideas in open debate. They don't really understand and haven't really assimilated these ideas, they really are "memes" in the full negative sense of the term -- encapsulated ideological poison, designed to destroy those who believe in them. To the extent that people try to understand such ideas, they are liberated from them, because in analyzing them they realize just how self-destructive they really are. This is also why the Left's purported "analysis" of such ideas is so obscurationist and murky: those who attempt to analyze them and still believe them have done so by failing to understand them at all -- and consequently are very bad at defending them in debate!
Brittingham and other have worried that postmodern leftism may yet win. If so, the victory would be short-lived. One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas’s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor.
Indeed. For those unaware of the sequence of events, al-Fatah, aka the PLO, a progressive Left group (by Muslim standards, anyway), "liberated" the Palestinians from the Israelis, only to immediately fall to Hamas, a reactionary Islamist organization backed by Iran. Part of the reason why is that the PLO really doesn't believe in anything other than killing Jews and destroying Israel; Hamas, by contrast, has ideals of its own. Believers beat nihilists, hands down and every time.
Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty’s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.
Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.
... leaving a power vacuum for the enemy to march into. That enemy was supposed to be the Soviet Union, but power vacuums attract any aggressor, Communist or otherwise.
Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi.
Precisely.
Look around you, brothers and sisters, and observe those who work to sabotage the West in the War on Terror. Observe their personal beliefs and characteristics. How well would they do trying to survive under an Islamist regime, or even in an environment where Islamists were free to raid and slay those who offended them through some distinguishing statement or factor?
The Western Left would actually survive less well than would the Western Right under those circumstances. Rightists would either actively fight back or retreat into isolationism; their personal beliefs and characteristics would not rouse the mujehadeen to atack. But what of the Leftists? Especially if we consider groups such as feminists and gays to naturally belong to the Left, as the Left itself so considers?
Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.
Yep. It becomes difficult to pretend that everybody is all getting along when somebody is setting your car on fire, or raping you, or burning down your house.
In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism - Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism.
What I've termed "Eurofascism" in some of my writings, see
"Surrender, Genocide, or What? ... A Very Dark Scenario" (April 24th, 2008, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/103364.html) and
"The Continuation of Surrender, Genocide, or What? and its Implications for America" (November 26th, 2008, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/103364.html)
and it becomes a highly likely scenario, if the parties currently in power in Europe succeed in blocking the democratic reaction against Islam for too long.
The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), ...
LOL yes ... how's Dubya's coup going, anyway?
... but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.
Most of whom either have a strong non-democratic tradition (France, Germany, Italy) or are actively demolishing the liberal democracy that they currently have (Great Britain).
The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.
What's worse, under the circumstances such a victory would be rightly applauded, meaning that the West would lose its inhibitions against nuclear weapons usage. In some ways that would be a good thing, since we might lose our superstitious fear of nuclear energy along with it, but I'd prefer to see the superstition fade away naturally under a peaceful world government, then be blasted away in the stress of a global war.
I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.
The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.
I concur.
What do the rest of you think?
From Armed and Dangerous, "Gramiscian Damage," http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260.
The Soviet disinformation campaign worked spectacularly well, despite the fact that the Soviets lost the Cold War:
The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the “leading elements” of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals; summary by Koch here) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.
Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people - at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.
Resisting them is much easier if one has a historiograhic context: if one is aware of what earlier societies believed and why, so that one grasps just how abnormally self-destructive is this disinformational legacy. The Right here has the advantage, as I argued in "Blindness to Cultural Versus Blindness to Biological Deep Time" (http://jordan179.livejournal.com/184786.html), because (now quoting myself)
The Left is essentiallly ignorant of cultural "deep time," which is to say of any history outside their personal memories. History and the people in it may be memorized as sets of disconnected data points or used as examples in this or that polemic, but it is not to be understood as a whole, nor lessons drawn from it, nor the opinions of individuals who lived in the past to be judged in the context of their times, let alone taken "seriously" (notice the "dead" part of "dead white males" -- simply having lived long ago is taken as a disqualification of one's arguments!)
If you read debates on social issues, or works on history, sociology or politics written before the Suicidalist memes became common, you can see just how bizarre those incorporating such memes actually are.
Returning to Armed and Dangerous:
Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the “race bomb” rumor, really were instruments deliberately designed to destroy the American way of life. Another index of their success is that most members of the bicoastal elite can no longer speak of “the American way of life” without deprecation, irony, or an automatic and half-conscious genuflection towards the altar of political correctness. In this and other ways, the corrosive effects of Stalin’s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.
And how bizarre is that? There is, after all, an "American way of life," just as there is a "French way of life" or a "Japanese way of life" or an "Australian Aboriginal way of life" -- why should we see the American way of life as being an ironic concept? This is also reinforced by an unconscious "only America is real" attitude, of course: if "the American way of life" is simply vanilla normality, then the quotes would make sense.
The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion. Liberal anticommunists (like myself in the 1970s) thought we were being judicious and fair-minded when we dismissed half of the Right’s complaint as crude blather. We were wrong; the Rosenbergs and Alger Hiss really were guilty, the Hollywood Ten really were Stalinist tools, and all of Joseph McCarthy’s rants about “Communists in the State Department” were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.
And note the extent to which the implications of the Venona transcripts for the Rosenberg, Hiss and other Early Cold War spy cases are ignored in popular histories. Note how many books still talk as if there was still any doubt of the guilt of the Rosenbergs or of Alger Hiss, despite the fact that we now pretty much know for sure that they were conscious and deliberate traitors.
While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn’t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture’s response to Islamic terrorism.
Making it harder for us to defeat the Islamists in an organized and humane fashion, which would be well within our power if our own internal enemies weren't sabotaging the war effort. This leaves us with two hideous alternatives, as we will see a bit later in this post.
Another consequence of Stalin’s meme war is that today’s left-wing antiwar demonstrators wear kaffiyehs without any sense of how grotesque it is for ostensible Marxists to cuddle up to religious absolutists who want to restore the power relations of the 7th century CE.
Indeed, to a true intellectual Marxist, this would be anathema. The Islamists represent a degree of primitive superstition not to be found in most modern Christian sects, and one which is profoundly not merely anti-liberal but also anti-Communist. Reflect on how Osama bin Laden got his start -- fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980's. The Islamists are no friends to the Western Left, and the Western Left cannot make them its friends by stroking them.
In Stalin’s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon - it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive.
As witness Stalin's own destruction of Russia's own brain trust, the Old Bolsheviks. Stalin wanted to ensure that there was no principle in the Soviet Union save blind worship of himself as The Leader, and thus made Communism as much as possible merely a blind force of destruction, which Stalin could aim this way and that to destroy his enemies of the moment.
This happens in every Communist revolution, because Communism has no checks on the power of whoever winds up being the Leader. If a given Leader is too scrupulous to use his power in this fashion, he eventually falls and is replaced by a Leader less scrupulous. It's fairly inevitable.
The postmodern left is now defined not by what it’s for but by what it’s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.
Again, I reference my own "Why Do Leftists Like Islamic Terrorists So Much?" (June 5th, 2007, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/20826.html ), for the way in which the Left has lost faith in its own capacity to achieve anything positive, and become merely a force for nihilistic hatred.
The first step to recovery is understanding the problem. Knowing that suicidalist memes were launched at us as war weapons by the espionage apparatus of the most evil despotism in human history is in itself liberating.
And enlightening. It gives one at least part of the explanation of why the Left is so poor at defending its ideas in open debate. They don't really understand and haven't really assimilated these ideas, they really are "memes" in the full negative sense of the term -- encapsulated ideological poison, designed to destroy those who believe in them. To the extent that people try to understand such ideas, they are liberated from them, because in analyzing them they realize just how self-destructive they really are. This is also why the Left's purported "analysis" of such ideas is so obscurationist and murky: those who attempt to analyze them and still believe them have done so by failing to understand them at all -- and consequently are very bad at defending them in debate!
Brittingham and other have worried that postmodern leftism may yet win. If so, the victory would be short-lived. One of the clearest lessons of recent times (exemplified not just by kaffiyeh-wearing western leftists but by Hamas’s recent clobbering of al-Fatah in the first Palestinian elections) is that po-mo leftism is weaker than liberal individualism in one important respect; it has only the weakest defenses against absolutist fervor.
Indeed. For those unaware of the sequence of events, al-Fatah, aka the PLO, a progressive Left group (by Muslim standards, anyway), "liberated" the Palestinians from the Israelis, only to immediately fall to Hamas, a reactionary Islamist organization backed by Iran. Part of the reason why is that the PLO really doesn't believe in anything other than killing Jews and destroying Israel; Hamas, by contrast, has ideals of its own. Believers beat nihilists, hands down and every time.
Brittingham tellingly notes po-mo philosopher Richard Rorty’s realization that when the babble of conflicting tribal narratives collapses in exhaustion, the only thing left is the will to power.
Again, this is by design. Lenin and Stalin wanted classical-liberal individualism replaced with something less able to resist totalitarianism, not more. Volk-Marxist fantasy and postmodern nihilism served their purposes; the emergence of an adhesive counter-ideology would not have. Thus, the Chomskys and Moores and Fisks are running a program carefully designed to dead-end at nothing.
... leaving a power vacuum for the enemy to march into. That enemy was supposed to be the Soviet Union, but power vacuums attract any aggressor, Communist or otherwise.
Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if transnational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of jihadi.
Precisely.
Look around you, brothers and sisters, and observe those who work to sabotage the West in the War on Terror. Observe their personal beliefs and characteristics. How well would they do trying to survive under an Islamist regime, or even in an environment where Islamists were free to raid and slay those who offended them through some distinguishing statement or factor?
The Western Left would actually survive less well than would the Western Right under those circumstances. Rightists would either actively fight back or retreat into isolationism; their personal beliefs and characteristics would not rouse the mujehadeen to atack. But what of the Leftists? Especially if we consider groups such as feminists and gays to naturally belong to the Left, as the Left itself so considers?
Whether the eventual winners are Muslims or Mormons, the future is not going to look like the fuzzy multicultural ecotopia of modern left fantasy. The death of that dream is being written in European banlieus by angry Muslim youths under the light of burning cars.
Yep. It becomes difficult to pretend that everybody is all getting along when somebody is setting your car on fire, or raping you, or burning down your house.
In the banlieus and elsewhere, Islamist pressure makes it certain that sooner or later the West is going to vomit Stalin’s memes out of its body politic. The worst way would be through a reflex development of Western absolutism - Christian chauvinism, nativism and militarism melding into something like Francoite fascism.
What I've termed "Eurofascism" in some of my writings, see
"Surrender, Genocide, or What? ... A Very Dark Scenario" (April 24th, 2008, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/103364.html) and
"The Continuation of Surrender, Genocide, or What? and its Implications for America" (November 26th, 2008, http://jordan179.livejournal.com/103364.html)
and it becomes a highly likely scenario, if the parties currently in power in Europe succeed in blocking the democratic reaction against Islam for too long.
The self-panicking leftists who think they see that in today’s Republicans are comically wrong (as witnessed by the fact that they aren’t being systematically jailed and executed), ...
LOL yes ... how's Dubya's coup going, anyway?
... but it is quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of Europe.
Most of whom either have a strong non-democratic tradition (France, Germany, Italy) or are actively demolishing the liberal democracy that they currently have (Great Britain).
The U.S., fortunately, is still on a demographic expansion wave and will be till at least 2050. But if the Islamists achieve their dream of nuking “crusader” cities, they’ll make crusaders out of the U.S., too. And this time, a West with a chauvinized America at its head would smite the Saracen with weapons that would destroy entire populations and fuse Mecca into glass. The horror of our victory would echo for a thousand years.
What's worse, under the circumstances such a victory would be rightly applauded, meaning that the West would lose its inhibitions against nuclear weapons usage. In some ways that would be a good thing, since we might lose our superstitious fear of nuclear energy along with it, but I'd prefer to see the superstition fade away naturally under a peaceful world government, then be blasted away in the stress of a global war.
I remain more optimistic than this. I think there is still an excellent chance that the West can recover from suicidalism without going through a fevered fascist episode and waging a genocidal war. But to do so, we have to do more than recognize Stalin’s memes; we have to reject them. We have to eject postmodern leftism from our universities, transnational progressivism from our politics, and volk-Marxism from our media.
The process won’t be pretty. But I fear that if the rest of us don’t hound the po-mo Left and its useful idiots out of public life with attack and ridicule and shunning, the hard Right will sooner or later get the power to do it by means that include a lot of killing. I don’t want to live in that future, and I don’t think any of my readers do, either. If we want to save a liberal, tolerant civilization for our children, we’d better get to work.
I concur.
What do the rest of you think?