February 22, 2006

Must Read

Eric S Raymond writes a great piece on memetic warfare.

    By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

    But it was the Soviet Union, in its day, that was the master of this game. They made dezinformatsiya (disinformation) a central weapon of their war against “the main adversary”, the U.S. They conducted memetic subversion against the U.S. on many levels at a scale that is only now becoming clear as historians burrow through their archives and ex-KGB officers sell their memoirs.

On the web Posted by AlexC at February 22, 2006 10:36 AM

It's not so much that they use/used liberty and the freedom of choice/speach against us as a weapon, but rather, the inate stupidity that comes along with making all the wrong choices. We are helpless against that and can only use (GASP!) our own propaganda to combat it internally and externally. Something that the Saudi's picked up on but we have forgotten.

Posted by: mdmhvonpa at February 22, 2006 2:32 PM

Must read, indeed! I dug hi list of the Soviet Unions memetic weapons.

-- There is no truth, only competing agendas.
-- All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the Wests history of racism and colonialism.
-- There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.
-- The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.
-- Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.
-- The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)
-- For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But oppressed people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.
-- When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorists point of view, and make concessions.
A fine collection of anti-Sharanskyism. I think these live on as Arnold Kling's "Folk Marxism."

Posted by: jk at February 23, 2006 4:49 PM

Hi, my name is johngalt. I'm an "evil oppressor."

Posted by: johngalt at February 25, 2006 3:26 PM | What do you think? [3]