Suicidalism
<p>The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist<br />
terror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker.  The<br />
suicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to<br />
spread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or<br />
journalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West&#8217;s<br />
will to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.</p>
<p>But al-Qaeda didn&#8217;t create the ugly streak of nihilism and<br />
self-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals.  Nor, I<br />
believe, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by<br />
Department V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with<br />
conducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West&#8217;s<br />
intelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover.  This they did with<br />
such magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union<br />
itself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western<br />
intellectual life.</p>
<p><span id="more-218"></span></p>
<p>Consider the following propositions:</p>
<ul>
<li>There is no truth, only competing agendas.
</li>
<li>All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority<br />
over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West&#8217;s history of racism and<br />
colonialism.</li>
<li>There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture<br />
to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such<br />
standards is an evil oppressor.</li>
<li>The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of<br />
the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be<br />
impoverished and miserable.</li>
<li>Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.<br />
Poor criminals are entitled to what they take.  Submitting to<br />
criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.</li>
<li>The poor are victims.  Criminals are victims.  And only<br />
victims are virtuous.  Therefore only the poor and criminals<br />
are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying<br />
with poor people and criminals.)</li>
<li>For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified.  It<br />
is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.<br />
But &#8220;oppressed&#8221; people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are<br />
merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.</li>
<li>When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner<br />
is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist&#8217;s point of<br />
view, and make concessions.</li>
</ul>
<p>These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism,<br />
multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, &#8220;political correctness&#8221;<br />
to name just a few.  It is time to recognize them for what they are,<br />
and call them by their right name: suicidalism.</p>
<p>Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930<br />
and 1950 when Department V was at its most effective) and you&#8217;ll find<br />
a Stalinist at the bottom.  Among the more notorious examples ware:<br />
Paul de Man &mdash; racist and Nazi propagandist turned Stalinist, and<br />
fonder of postmodernism; Jean-Paul Sarte, who described the effects<br />
of Stalinism as &#8220;humane terror&#8221; and helped invent existentialism; and<br />
Paul Baran, who developed the thesis that capitalism depended on the<br />
immiseration of the Third World after Marx&#8217;s immiseration of the<br />
proletariat failed to materialize.</p>
<p>Al-Qaeda didn&#8217;t launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but<br />
it relies on them for political cover.  They have another effect as<br />
well: when Islamists characterize the West as &#8220;decadent&#8221;, and aver<br />
that it is waiting to collapse in on itself at the touch of jihad,<br />
they are describing quite correctly and accurately the effects of<br />
Western suicidalism.</p>
<p>Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully<br />
building on the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even<br />
self-loathing) are the primary indicators of virtue.  In this way of<br />
thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store up grace<br />
in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort of<br />
submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.</p>
<p>The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian<br />
self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among<br />
Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists.  All the<br />
propagandists had to do was make the case that the value of<br />
self-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals.  By doing<br />
so, they were able to entrench the idea that suicidalists are morally<br />
superior to non-suicidalists.</p>
<p>They did this so successfully that at least one major form of<br />
Western self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary<br />
phenomenon: &#8220;deep environmentalism&#8221;.  I can&#8217;t find any sign that this<br />
traces back to the usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather<br />
obviously a result of generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but<br />
to species.</p>
<p>I think it&#8217;s important to understand that, although suicidalism<br />
builds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not<br />
a native or natural development.  It is an infection that evildoers<br />
and their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the<br />
West; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method<br />
was to talk the West into slitting its own throat.</p>
<p>Al-Qaeda&#8217;s goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the<br />
imposition of shari&#8217;a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is<br />
abolished and absorbed into the Dar al-Islam.  In other words,<br />
totalitarian theocracy.  Western suicidalists have transferred<br />
their allegience from Communism to Islamofascism without a hitch.<br />
They&#8217;re doing their best to see that we lose &mdash; and their<br />
best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.</p>
<p>Thus, to defeat al-Qaeda, stopping the suicide bombers is<br />
not sufficient.  We must recognize, condemn, and reject the<br />
suicide thinkers as well.</p>
<p>UPDATE: Readers who think I&#8217;m peddling mere conspiracy theory here should read<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1929631200/103-2318992-6001459?v=glance">Double Lives : Stalin, Willi Munzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals</a>  for a description of the way KGB disinformation activity, espionage and memetic warfare fused in the 1930s.</p>
<p>MORE: Some intelligent comments on these memes<br />
<a href="http://weblog.roth-cline.net/archives/2005/09/the_rest_of_the.html">here</a>, pointing out that they get their<br />
infectivity from being partially true.</p>
