{"id":218,"date":"2005-09-13T13:17:06","date_gmt":"2005-09-13T18:17:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=218"},"modified":"2005-09-19T13:24:16","modified_gmt":"2005-09-19T18:24:16","slug":"suicidalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=218","title":{"rendered":"Suicidalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist<br \/>\nterror network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker.  The<br \/>\nsuicide bomber is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to<br \/>\nspread terror; the suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or<br \/>\njournalist or politician whose mission it is to destroy the West&#8217;s<br \/>\nwill to resist not just terrorism but any ideological challenge at all.<\/p>\n<p>But al-Qaeda didn&#8217;t create the ugly streak of nihilism and<br \/>\nself-loathing that afflicts too many Western intellectuals.  Nor, I<br \/>\nbelieve, is it a natural development. It was brought to us by<br \/>\nDepartment V of the KGB, which was charged during the Cold War with<br \/>\nconducting memetic warfare that would destroy the will of the West&#8217;s<br \/>\nintelligentsia to resist a Communist takeover.  This they did with<br \/>\nsuch magnificent effect that the infection outlasted the Soviet Union<br \/>\nitself and remains a pervasive disease of contemporary Western<br \/>\nintellectual life.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Consider the following propositions:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>There is no truth, only competing agendas.\n<\/li>\n<li>All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority<br \/>\nover Communism\/Fascism\/Islam are vitiated by the West&#8217;s history of racism and<br \/>\ncolonialism.<\/li>\n<li>There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture<br \/>\nto be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such<br \/>\nstandards is an evil oppressor.<\/li>\n<li>The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of<br \/>\nthe Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be<br \/>\nimpoverished and miserable.<\/li>\n<li>Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal.<br \/>\nPoor criminals are entitled to what they take.  Submitting to<br \/>\ncriminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.<\/li>\n<li>The poor are victims.  Criminals are victims.  And only<br \/>\nvictims are virtuous.  Therefore only the poor and criminals<br \/>\nare virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying<br \/>\nwith poor people and criminals.)<\/li>\n<li>For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified.  It<br \/>\nis always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself.<br \/>\nBut &#8220;oppressed&#8221; people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are<br \/>\nmerely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.<\/li>\n<li>When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner<br \/>\nis to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist&#8217;s point of<br \/>\nview, and make concessions.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism,<br \/>\nmulticulturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, &#8220;political correctness&#8221;<br \/>\nto name just a few.  It is time to recognize them for what they are,<br \/>\nand call them by their right name: suicidalism.<\/p>\n<p>Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930<br \/>\nand 1950 when Department V was at its most effective) and you&#8217;ll find<br \/>\na Stalinist at the bottom.  Among the more notorious examples ware:<br \/>\nPaul de Man &mdash; racist and Nazi propagandist turned Stalinist, and<br \/>\nfonder of postmodernism; Jean-Paul Sarte, who described the effects<br \/>\nof Stalinism as &#8220;humane terror&#8221; and helped invent existentialism; and<br \/>\nPaul Baran, who developed the thesis that capitalism depended on the<br \/>\nimmiseration of the Third World after Marx&#8217;s immiseration of the<br \/>\nproletariat failed to materialize.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Qaeda didn&#8217;t launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but<br \/>\nit relies on them for political cover.  They have another effect as<br \/>\nwell: when Islamists characterize the West as &#8220;decadent&#8221;, and aver<br \/>\nthat it is waiting to collapse in on itself at the touch of jihad,<br \/>\nthey are describing quite correctly and accurately the effects of<br \/>\nWestern suicidalism.<\/p>\n<p>Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully<br \/>\nbuilding on the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even<br \/>\nself-loathing) are the primary indicators of virtue.  In this way of<br \/>\nthinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store up grace<br \/>\nin Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort of<br \/>\nsubmitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.<\/p>\n<p>The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian<br \/>\nself-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among<br \/>\nWesterners who are themselves agnostics or atheists.  All the<br \/>\npropagandists had to do was make the case that the value of<br \/>\nself-abnegation applies to culture as well as individuals.  By doing<br \/>\nso, they were able to entrench the idea that suicidalists are morally<br \/>\nsuperior to non-suicidalists.<\/p>\n<p>They did this so successfully that at least one major form of<br \/>\nWestern self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary<br \/>\nphenomenon: &#8220;deep environmentalism&#8221;.  I can&#8217;t find any sign that this<br \/>\ntraces back to the usual Stalinist suspects, but it is rather<br \/>\nobviously a result of generalizing suicidalism not just to culture but<br \/>\nto species.<\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s important to understand that, although suicidalism<br \/>\nbuilds on some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not<br \/>\na native or natural development.  It is an infection that evildoers<br \/>\nand their dupes created and then spread as part of a war against the<br \/>\nWest; their goal was totalitarian control, and part of their method<br \/>\nwas to talk the West into slitting its own throat.<\/p>\n<p>Al-Qaeda&#8217;s goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the<br \/>\nimposition of shari&#8217;a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is<br \/>\nabolished and absorbed into the Dar al-Islam.  In other words,<br \/>\ntotalitarian theocracy.  Western suicidalists have transferred<br \/>\ntheir allegience from Communism to Islamofascism without a hitch.<br \/>\nThey&#8217;re doing their best to see that we lose &mdash; and their<br \/>\nbest is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.<\/p>\n<p>Thus, to defeat al-Qaeda, stopping the suicide bombers is<br \/>\nnot sufficient.  We must recognize, condemn, and reject the<br \/>\nsuicide thinkers as well.<\/p>\n<p>UPDATE: Readers who think I&#8217;m peddling mere conspiracy theory here should read<br \/>\n<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>\n<p>MORE: Some intelligent comments on these memes<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/weblog.roth-cline.net\/archives\/2005\/09\/the_rest_of_the.html\">here<\/a>, pointing out that they get their<br \/>\ninfectivity from being partially true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=218\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Suicidalism<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-218","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=218"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=218"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=218"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=218"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}