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