Re: Suicidalism

The view of history here is very, very short, but hardly surprising given
the continuing "history is bunk" and only honoring the new.

SeeingEyeDog wrote:

> Suicidalism
> By Eric S. Raymond
> esr.ibiblio.org | September 29, 2005
>
> The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror
> network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber
> is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the
> suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or
> politician whose mission it is to destroy the West's will to resist not
> just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.
>
> But al-Qaeda didn't create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing
> that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a
> natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB,
> which
> was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that
> would destroy the will of the West's intelligentsia to resist a Communist
> takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection
> outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of
> contemporary Western intellectual life.
>
> Consider the following propositions:
>
> 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. [the origin of the left's anti-white Nazism]
>
> 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.
>
> These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism,
> multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, "political correctness" to
> name just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call
> them by their right name: suicidalism.
>
> Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930 and
> 1950 when Department V was at its most effective) and you'll find a
> Stalinist at the bottom. Among the more notorious examples were:
>
> Paul de Man - racist and Nazi propagandist turned Stalinist, and fonder of
> postmodernism;
> Jean-Paul Sartre, who described the effects of Stalinism as "humane
> terror"
> and helped invent existentialism; and Paul Baran, who developed the
> thesis
> that capitalism depended on the immiseration of the Third World after
> Marx's immiseration of the proletariat failed to materialize.
>
> Al-Qaeda didn't launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but it
> relies on them for political cover. They have another effect as well: when
> Islamists characterize the West as "decadent", and is waiting to collapse
> in on itself at the touch of jihad, they are describing quite correctly
> and accurately the effects of Western suicidalism.
>
> Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully building on
> the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even self-loathing) are the
> primary indicators of virtue.
>
> In this way of thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we
> store up grace in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary
> discomfort of submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and
> terrorists.
>
> The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian
> self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among
> Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists. All the
> propagandists had to do was make the case that the value of
> self-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals. By doing so,
> they were able to entrench the
> idea that suicidalists are morally superior to non-suicidalists.
>
> They did this so successfully that at least one major form of Western
> self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary phenomenon: "deep
> environmentalism". I can't find any sign that this traces back to the
> usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather obviously a result of
> generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but to species.
>
> I think it's important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on
> some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or
> natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes
> created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was
> totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into
> slitting its own throat.
>
> Al-Qaeda's goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the imposition of
> shari'a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is abolished and absorbed
> into the Dar al-Islam. In other words, totalitarian theocracy. Western
> suicidalists have transferred their allegiance from Communism to
> Islamofascism without a hitch. They're doing their best to see that we
> lose - and their best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.
>
> Thus, to defeat al-Qaeda, stopping the suicide bombers is not
> sufficient. We must recognize, condemn, and reject the suicide thinkers as
> well.
>
> UPDATE: Readers who think I'm peddling mere conspiracy theory here should
> read Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the
> Intellectuals for a description of the way KGB disinformation activity,
> espionage and memetic warfare fused in the 1930s.
>
> http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19658

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