[lit-ideas] Gramscian damage
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 12:12:53 -0800
Someone sent me the following from Blog site: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260
I don't know who this guy is, but I like him.
Lawrence
Gramscian <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260> damage
Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level
assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable
material success we have. We use "extremist" as a negative epithetic. Even
the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their
political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.
We don't expect ideas to matter - or, when they do, we expect them to matter
only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression
or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the "root causes" of Islamic
terrorism, as if the terrorists' very clear and very ideological account of
their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.
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 <http://www.anti-cair-net.org/> .
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.
The Soviets had an entire "active measures" department devoted to churning
out anti-American dezinformatsiya. A classic example is the rumor that AIDS
was the result of research aimed at building a
<http://www.righto.com/theories/kgb.html> 'race bomb' that would selectively
kill black people.
On a different level, in the 1930s members of CPUSA (the Communist Party of
the USA) got instructions from Moscow to promote non-representational art so
that the US's public spaces would become arid and ugly.
Americans hearing that last one tend to laugh. But the Soviets, following
the lead of Marxist theoreticians like Antonio Gramsci, took very seriously
the idea that by blighting the U.S.'s intellectual and esthetic life, they
could sap Americans' will to resist Communist ideology and an eventual
Communist takeover. The explicit goal was to erode the confidence of
America's ruling class and create an ideological vacuum to be filled by
Marxism-Leninism.
Accordingly, the Soviet espionage apparat actually ran two different kinds
of network: one of spies, and one of agents of influence. The agents of
influence had the minor function of recruiting spies (as, for example, when
Kim Philby was brought in by one of his tutors at Cambridge), but their
major function was to spread dezinformatsiya, to launch memetic weapons that
would damage and weaken the West.
In a previous post on Suicidalism <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=218> , I
identified some of the most important of the Soviet Union's memetic weapons.
Here is that list again:
* There is no truth, only competing agendas.
* All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority
over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West's 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 terrorist's point of view, and
make concessions.
As I previously observed, if you trace any of these back far enough, you'll
find a Stalinist intellectual at the bottom. (The last two items on the
list, for example, came to us courtesy of Frantz Fanon. The fourth item is
the Baran-Wallerstein "world system" thesis.) Most were staples of Soviet
propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by "progressives"
(read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western
intelligentsia.
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 <http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/12/nov93/koch.htm> ) 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.
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.
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.
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.
In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written
<http://www.proteinwisdom.com/index.php/weblog/entry/19801/> eloquently
about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes - the idea that
rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that
every identity group (except the "ruling class") has the right to suppress
criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.
Mark Brittingham (aka WildMonk) has written an excellent essay
<http://wildmonk.net/> on the roots of this doctrine in Rousseau and the
post-Enlightenment Romantics. It has elsewhere been analyzed and labeled as
transnational
<http://www.unc.edu/depts/diplomat/archives_roll/2002_04-06/fonte_ideologica
l/fonte_ideological.html> progressivism. The Soviets didn't invent it, but
they promoted it heavily in a deliberate - and appallingly successful -
attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies
classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western
politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity
groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.
Call it what you will - various other commentators have favored
'volk-Marxism' or 'postmodern leftism'. I've called it suicidalism. It was
designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it's now being used
against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often
sounds like he's reading from back issues of Z magazine, and no accident
that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in
the 1930s and '40s.
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. In Stalin's hands, even
Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon - it became
increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left
is now defined not by what it's for but by by what it's against:
classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America,
and the idea of objective reality itself.
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. Liberating, too, it is to realize that the Noam Chomskys and
Michael Moores and Robert Fisks of the world (and their thousands of lesser
imitators in faculty lounges everywhere) are not brave transgressive
forward-thinkers but pathetic memebots running the program of a dead tyrant.
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.
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.
Religions are good at filling that kind of nothing. Accordingly, if
transational progressivism actually succeeds in smothering liberal
individualism, its reward will be to be put to the sword by some flavor of
jihadi. 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.
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. 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), but it is
quite a plausible future for the demographically-collapsing nations of
Europe.
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.
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.
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