{"id":29547,"date":"2015-01-12T01:00:33","date_gmt":"2015-01-12T06:00:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29547"},"modified":"2019-09-30T10:45:57","modified_gmt":"2019-09-30T14:45:57","slug":"qotd-the-soviet-unions-incredibly-successful-ideological-warfare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/01\/12\/qotd-the-soviet-unions-incredibly-successful-ideological-warfare\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Soviet Union’s incredibly successful ideological warfare"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the \u201cleading elements\u201d of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch\u2019s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals<\/em>; summary by Koch here<\/a>) This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think<\/em> 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Koch shows us that the worst-case scenario was, as it turns out now, the correct one; these ideas, like the \u201crace bomb\u201d rumor, really were<\/em> 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 \u201cthe American way of life\u201d 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\u2019s meme war have come to utterly pervade our culture.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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\u2019s rants about \u201cCommunists in the State Department\u201d were essentially true. The Venona transcripts and other new material leave no room for reasonable doubt on this score.<\/p>\n

While the espionage apparatus of the Soviet Union didn\u2019t outlast it, their memetic weapons did. These memes are now coming near to crippling our culture\u2019s response to Islamic terrorism.<\/p>\n

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently<\/a> about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes \u2014 the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the \u201cruling class\u201d) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence.<\/p>\n

Mark Brittingham (aka WildMonk) has written an excellent essay<\/a> on the roots of this doctrine in Rousseau and the post-Enlightenment Romantics. It has elsewhere been analyzed and labeled as transnational progressivism<\/a>. The Soviets didn\u2019t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate \u2014 and appallingly successful \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

Call it what you will \u2014 various other commentators have favored \u2018volk-Marxism\u2019 or \u2018postmodern leftism\u2019. I\u2019ve called it suicidalism. It was designed to paralyze the West against one enemy, but it\u2019s now being used against us by another. It is no accident that Osama bin Laden so often sounds like he\u2019s reading from back issues of Z magazine<\/em>, and no accident that both constantly echo the hoariest old cliches of Soviet propaganda in the 1930s and \u201940s.<\/p>\n

Another consequence of Stalin\u2019s meme war is that today\u2019s 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\u2019s hands, even Marxism itself was hollowed out to serve as a memetic weapon \u2014 it became increasingly nihilist, hatred-focused and destructive. The postmodern left is now defined not by what it\u2019s for but by what it\u2019s against: classical-liberal individualism, free markets, dead white males, America, and the idea of objective reality itself.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Gramscian damage”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2006-02-11.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Soviets consciously followed the Gramscian prescription; they pursued a war of position, subverting the \u201cleading elements\u201d of society through their agents of influence. (See, for example, Stephen Koch\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,28,53,41,13],"tags":[108,476,1235,622,1309,269,433],"class_list":["post-29547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-coldwar","tag-espionage","tag-esr","tag-ideology","tag-josephmccarthy","tag-propaganda","tag-sovietunion"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Gz","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29547"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29547\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":51421,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29547\/revisions\/51421"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}