38 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
38 lines
2.4 KiB
Plaintext
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’t believe in free speech?</p>
|
|
<p>People talk about Eurabia, but what’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’s ellipsis points to the same future I’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’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’s worse, we’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’ meme<br />
|
|
war against the West is important — because, whatever native<br />
|
|
defects in Western political culture there may be, European elites did<br />
|
|
not simply fall into a state of “morally and intellectually weak”.<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’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’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’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>
|