The Gramscian march of play toy ideas

Neo wrote a post yesterday, The Long Slow March of Leftism. In it, she references an essay from a few years ago by a blogger esr which I had not thought of in quite a while though I subscribe to their thesis. The original post is Gramscian Damage by esr.

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.

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.

It is an important hypothesis - postmodernism/social justice ideology are destructive ideas fostered by the Soviets as a means of weakening the social and cultural fabric of their ideological opponents. It sounds like a conspiracy theory and it can be absurdly over-egged.

Societies are enormously prone to generating their own homegrown absurdities, urban myths, and dysfunctional behaviors. Not all such manifestations are evidence of a long ago disinformation campaign. But do some of our contemporary ideologies have roots in those long ago Soviet initiatives. Some of them, clearly.

ESR has a list of Soviet memetic disinformation themes. These are ideas which he/she sources to the Soviets. In reality, I think they are shared manifestations rather than anything they deliberately set out to construct. In other words, the Soviets supported the domestic ideological deviants in the West most likely to cause harm and these ideas are a result of emergent order. As Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson might have put it, these memes are the "result of human action, but not the execution of any human design."

ESR's list. I have added in parentheses my crude estimation as to when these became accepted mental constructs. Typically in Europe before America.

There is no truth, only competing agendas. [Western philosophy has spent 2,500 years trying to figure out truth, always with the latent idea that there might be no truth, only might. But the idea that there is no truth,, everything is socially constructed and it is all about group competition? Late nineties in America perhaps]

All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism. [Easily since the sixties in Europe. more like the seventies or eighties in America.]

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. [A core tenant of multiculturalism and ascendant in Europe by the early seventies. Late eighties or early nineties in America and never as prevalent here as there.]

The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable. [Sixties in Europe, nineties in America.]

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. [Three separate propositions with differing origins. That crime is a social product of capitalism is a tenant of Marxism so that goes back to the beginning of the 20th century. Vocal academic/public intellectual support for it common in Europe in fifties and sixties. Perhaps eighties in America.]

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.) [The sentiment was there in Europe for much of the 20th century but this is very much a product of intersectional theory, so America in the late nineties early 2000s.]

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. [The theory of pacifism has been a constant through most of Western philosophy but this particular version is very much a product of intersectional theory, so America in the late nineties early 2000s.]

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. [This is very much a product of intersectional theory, so America in the late nineties early 2000s.]

All these are nonsense. Play toy ideas for "daring" public intellectuals but not for real people leading real lives.