Being Led Down the Path

For John, BLUF:  Perfect is the enemy of good enough, and in politics perfect is an illusion.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

---

Gramscian damage

Now there is a name to conjure with—Antonio Gramsci.  Here is Wikipedia's take on his views.

Anyway, the above linked article is by Mr Eric Raymond, from Armed and Dangerous, way back on 11 February 2006.

It is pertinent today because of the reactions to President Trump's speech in Poland.

Although over a decade old, the commentary is pertinent to today's activities.  Here is the lede:

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 epithet. 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.

Further on Mr Raymond writes:

In a previous post on Suicidalism, 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.

Hat tip to the InstaPundit.

Regards  —  Cliff

Gramscian damage