How Sweet the Uses of Conspiracy
<p>Glenn Reynolds<br />
<a href='http://instapundit.com/archives/028866.php'>writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When other groups decide that the way to get favorable press is to<br />
use violence, those who have wimped out now will have no one to blame<br />
but themselves. As a reader emailed me a while back, what use is a<br />
free press if it doesn&#8217;t believe in free speech?</p>
<p>People talk about Eurabia, but what&#8217;s really happened is that<br />
Europe has become Weimarized, with governments and institutions too<br />
morally and intellectually weak to stand up for the principles they<br />
pretend to embody. And we know what that led to last time . . . .</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Glenn&#8217;s ellipsis points to the same future I&#8217;ve foreseen, one in<br />
which true <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=94'>fascism</a> re-emerges as an important ideology in the West.<br />
If that&#8217;s the only reservoir of Western will to resist Islamism<br />
remaining, may the gods help us all because we are going to hear<br />
marching jackboots again.  And what&#8217;s worse, we&#8217;re going to learn to<br />
<em>like</em> that sound.  To hear salvation in it, because the<br />
alternative of surrender and creeping dhimmitude is worse.</p>
<p>This is why understanding the nature and scope of the Soviets&#8217; meme<br />
war against the West is important &mdash; because, whatever native<br />
defects in Western political culture there may be, European elites did<br />
not simply fall into a state of &#8220;morally and intellectually weak&#8221;.<br />
They were <em>pushed</em>. Manipulated, memetically poisoned, seduced<br />
by the agents of tyranny for more than sixty years.</p>
<p>Humans are a fractious lot, but we&#8217;re instinctively wired to<br />
respond to external threats by standing shoulder-to-shoulder.<br />
Exposing the Soviet meme war is more than just an exercise in<br />
recovering the truth of history, it&#8217;s a way of re-framing our<br />
intramural political conflicts that may allow us to purge suicidalist<br />
thinking and find a collective backbone again without having to go<br />
through a neo-fascist episode to get there.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll go so far as to say that if no actual conspiracy to drag the<br />
West into <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=260'>intellectual<br />
nihilism and moral paralysis</a> had existed, it would be necessary at<br />
this point in our history to invent one.</p>
