{"id":268,"date":"2006-02-28T13:25:39","date_gmt":"2006-02-28T18:25:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=268"},"modified":"2006-02-28T15:54:21","modified_gmt":"2006-02-28T20:54:21","slug":"how-sweet-the-uses-of-conspiracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=268","title":{"rendered":"How Sweet the Uses of Conspiracy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Glenn Reynolds<br \/>\n<a href='http:\/\/instapundit.com\/archives\/028866.php'>writes<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>When other groups decide that the way to get favorable press is to<br \/>\nuse violence, those who have wimped out now will have no one to blame<br \/>\nbut themselves. As a reader emailed me a while back, what use is a<br \/>\nfree press if it doesn&#8217;t believe in free speech?<\/p>\n<p>People talk about Eurabia, but what&#8217;s really happened is that<br \/>\nEurope has become Weimarized, with governments and institutions too<br \/>\nmorally and intellectually weak to stand up for the principles they<br \/>\npretend to embody. And we know what that led to last time . . . .<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Glenn&#8217;s ellipsis points to the same future I&#8217;ve foreseen, one in<br \/>\nwhich true <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=94'>fascism<\/a> re-emerges as an important ideology in the West.<br \/>\nIf that&#8217;s the only reservoir of Western will to resist Islamism<br \/>\nremaining, may the gods help us all because we are going to hear<br \/>\nmarching jackboots again.  And what&#8217;s worse, we&#8217;re going to learn to<br \/>\n<em>like<\/em> that sound.  To hear salvation in it, because the<br \/>\nalternative of surrender and creeping dhimmitude is worse.<\/p>\n<p>This is why understanding the nature and scope of the Soviets&#8217; meme<br \/>\nwar against the West is important &mdash; because, whatever native<br \/>\ndefects in Western political culture there may be, European elites did<br \/>\nnot simply fall into a state of &#8220;morally and intellectually weak&#8221;.<br \/>\nThey were <em>pushed<\/em>. Manipulated, memetically poisoned, seduced<br \/>\nby the agents of tyranny for more than sixty years.<\/p>\n<p>Humans are a fractious lot, but we&#8217;re instinctively wired to<br \/>\nrespond to external threats by standing shoulder-to-shoulder.<br \/>\nExposing the Soviet meme war is more than just an exercise in<br \/>\nrecovering the truth of history, it&#8217;s a way of re-framing our<br \/>\nintramural political conflicts that may allow us to purge suicidalist<br \/>\nthinking and find a collective backbone again without having to go<br \/>\nthrough a neo-fascist episode to get there.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll go so far as to say that if no actual conspiracy to drag the<br \/>\nWest into <a href='http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=260'>intellectual<br \/>\nnihilism and moral paralysis<\/a> had existed, it would be necessary at<br \/>\nthis point in our history to invent one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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&#8217;t believe in free speech? People talk&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=268\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">How Sweet the Uses of Conspiracy<\/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":[7,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-terror","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","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=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}