Search






Jeff's Amazon.com Wish List

Archive Calendar

November 2024
M T W T F S S
 123
45678910
11121314151617
18192021222324
252627282930  

Archives

Cassandra-ism, 3

Jonah Goldberg, back in 2009:

…what really interests me is the question of what the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War really was, if it wasn’t the existence of nukes.

Some might say the military-industrial complex or the national-security state. But not me. To me, the most obvious dangerous legacy of the Cold War would have to be the damage the Soviets did to the world. I don’t mean the millions they murdered; those dead do not threaten us now, even if they should haunt us.

I mean the relentless distortion of the truth, the psychological violence they visited on the West and the World via their useful idiots and their agents. I’m thinking not merely of the intellectual corruption of the American Left (which even folks like Richard Rorty had to concede), but the corruption of reformers and their movements around the globe. Soviet propaganda still contaminates, while nuclear fallout does not. Lies about America, the West, and the nature of democratic capitalism live on throughout the third world and in radioactive pockets on American campuses.

The Soviet effort to foster wars of national liberation, to poison the minds of the “Bandung Generation,” to deracinate cultures from their own indigenous building blocks of democracy, to destroy non-Marxist competitors interested in reform, to create evil and despotic regimes that are seen as “authentic” because they represent the “true will” of their subjugated and beaten down peoples: these seem to me to amount to the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. Not least because it was those sorts of efforts that gave birth to North Korea in the first place.

(thanks to GeoffB)

31 Replies to “Cassandra-ism, 3”

  1. Alec Leamas says:

    Beware Leftists bearing words.

  2. LTC John says:

    And I have had a good old time facing some of this crap in the Arab world, ready consumers for all the Soviet agit-prop they could eat. I think the only reason the Afghans didn’t buy it so much was that they had several years of direct experience in Soviet benevolence.

  3. LBascom says:

    Yeah, nukes are a tool. It’s the one holding the tool you have to worry about.

    Fighting commies was tough when they were mostly on another continent, they’re real fucking scary in the White House.

  4. Joe says:

    You would think the failure of communist and socialist states to perform over the last 100 years would discredit them as an economic system, but damn if this stuff doesn’t keep sprouting up like crab grass in the lawn.

  5. Joe says:

    The more we discuss and discredit this bullshit, the less effect it has. Crab grass is not the best analogy for this, mold is better. Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

  6. Alec Leamas says:

    It’s fundamental to commies. The Bolsheviks took their name from the word “bolshoi” meaning “big, majority,” when they were anything but, and have been rolling ever since.

  7. Stephanie says:

    So the Commie movement is ballet for the masses? Explains Rahm.

  8. McGehee says:

    Yeah, nukes are a tool. It’s the one holding the tool you have to worry about.

    Heh. “Nukes don’t kill people. Fucking commie terrorist scum kills people.”

  9. Re the “intellectual corruption,” this video may be relevant. KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov explains the demoralising intent of Marxist-Leninist ideology. It isn’t clear exactly how much is boasting and embellishment, but his reference to making “soft” student brains impervious to facts may strike a chord.

  10. geoffb says:

    Also instructive is this piece which sdferr sent to me a couple days ago.

    Marxists. I Hate These Guys.
    […]
    Those not keen on regurgitation might want to skip Terry Eagleton’s hagiography of Eric Hobsbawm, and its appreciation of the supposed glories of Marxism. But if readers feel like experiencing gastrointestinal upset, then they can allow their eyes to linger over Eagleton’s celebration of the “indomitable” Hobsbawm, who “remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp”

  11. Joe says:

    I remain a bit concerned of commie nukes ending up in the hands of bat shit crazy Islamic fascist goat fuckers.

    But that is me. Maybe I am paranoid.

    On the bright said, a limited nuclear exchange might forestall global warming.

  12. newrouter says:

    As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe. KGB chairman Yuri Andropov managed our anti-Vietnam War operation. He often bragged about having damaged the U.S. foreign-policy consensus, poisoned domestic debate in the U.S., and built a credibility gap between America and European public opinion through our disinformation operations. Vietnam was, he once told me, “our most significant success.”

    The KGB organized a vitriolic conference in Stockholm to condemn America’s aggression, on March 8, 1965, as the first American troops arrived in south Vietnam. On Andropov’s orders, one of the KGB’s paid agents, Romesh Chandra, the chairman of the KGB-financed World Peace Council, created the Stockholm Conference on Vietnam as a permanent international organization to aid or to conduct operations to help Americans dodge the draft or defect, to demoralize its army with anti-American propaganda, to conduct protests, demonstrations, and boycotts, and to sanction anyone connected with the war. It was staffed by Soviet-bloc undercover intelligence officers and received about $15 million annually from the Communist Party’s international department–on top of the WPC’s $50 million a year, all delivered in laundered cash dollars. Both groups had Soviet-style secretariats to manage their general activities, Soviet-style working committees to conduct their day-to-day operations, and Soviet-style bureaucratic paperwork. The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very like a direct quote from one of these organizations’ propaganda sheeets

    link

  13. McGehee says:

    11. Joe posted on 2/28 @ 12:10 pm

    There was a short story some time back, about when Gullible Warming was just taking off, in which two senior officers in different members of the nuclear club agree between them to launch a few missiles into the Pacific to create a nuclear autumn and forestall global warming.

    I’m sure the watermelons must have been producing brown Fruit of the Looms in bulk when that story appeared. Wish to hell I remembered where I saw it.

  14. McGehee says:

    …and judging from the comments at Joe’s link, the brownshorts are out in force once again. Love it.

  15. Joe says:

    So the revolution starts off with a mixed bad of marxist rhetoric and calls for democracy and ends up how? Becareful of what you wish for.

  16. Joe says:

    Call me crazy, but I prefer the tea partiers.

  17. Joe says:

    Hey wait talking about party time, excellent, let’s not forget Teddy.

    He liked socialist talk, provided it was combined with hot Latina sex.

  18. Pellegri says:

    Crab grass is not the best analogy for this, mold is better.

    Think Cordyceps, the mind-control fungal parasite:

    Cordyceps unilateralis is a parasitoid fungus that infects ants such as Camponotus leonardi, and alters their behavior in order to ensure the widespread distribution of its spores. It is a prime example of such a parasite.

    Heh. “Unilateralis”.

  19. Pellegri says:

    @Joe, 11:

    Comments there made me desire to punch people through the internet. Predictable and kind of sad. (Okay, well–I feel bad for the Bikini Atoll survivor and somewhat bad for the lady with chronic radiation poisoning but the obligatory “awww poor Palestinians living downwind of the West Bank nuclear reactor bawwww BAD ISRAELIS” spin because we’re all progressive and totally bought into the narrative about Israel being jerks–that lost me.)

    I want to stop being angry and tired all the time but damn it people make it hard.

    I do not want to be reasonable and discuss alternatives with these jackasses when they persist in describing me, my family, my loved ones, my social circle, the people I look up to and read and form my opinion on, as mouth-breathers who believe in an invisible man in the sky. And while their leaders know that, this common flock–these minions–just run around parroting the approved narrative about their “opponents,” close their minds, and don’t understand why I have no desire to discuss anything more important than the weather with them.

    Which is, I suppose, how the people in charge of them want it to be. Ugh.

  20. Entropy says:

    I want to stop being angry and tired all the time

    I want to be married to Danica McKellar. You’ll get use to it eventually.

    And then take up drinking… more…

  21. Joe says:

    Pellegri–I find some comment threads cannot be read without several fingers of fine scotch or bourbon. I can write you a Rx. Go to the nearest liquor store pharmacy and get a decent single malt or a bourbon such as Maker’s Mark, Knob Hill, or Blanton’s.

  22. Joe says:

    If you prefer white liquors clear medicine, I find Petron Silver on the rocks with lime juice works wonders too.

  23. A fine scotch says:

    Joe,

    I find everything is better with either hot Latina sex (17) or Maker’s Mark (21). Combine them and watch out!

  24. Ernst Schreiber says:

    if readers feel like experiencing gastrointestinal upset, then they can allow their eyes to linger over Eagleton’s celebration of the “indomitable” Hobsbawm, who “remains broadly committed to the Marxist camp”

    Ah yes. Eric Hobsbawm. The respectable David Irving.

  25. geoffb says:

    When you are determined to march onward to socialism whether you follow the low road or the high road matters much for those of a certain stylistic temperament. For the rest of us both roads lead to the same hell so the distinction is without difference.

  26. Blake says:

    I finally had to admit these leftists are our enemies. leftists are not misguided. Rather, they have malicious intent.

    Since I’m well aware of the malicious intent of the left, I no longer worry or care about civil discourse.

    Marxists are to be discredited, destroyed and run back under the rocks from which they crawled.

  27. mathew1421 says:

    In my Humanities class, we read Marx, then Nietzsche, and now are in the middle of Animal Farm. I talked to them about social contract philosophy, Rousseau, and especially Hobbes. But the students are eager to talk about how this stuff works in the real world, currently or historically.

    Of course, they’re reading Animal Farm after much of the specifics of the allegory are just gone and one wonders how they were ever relevant. My concern is that they look at the warnings Orwell makes in Animal Farm, see what happened to the Soviet Union, and figure, well, that sort of system just isn’t sustainable and eventually falls apart on its own accord.

    I’m going to show them the 1955 British animated version tomorrow in class (or at least parts) because in the end of the movie, the remaining animals–besides the ruling pigs–band together from other farms besides Manor Farm and attack the suspiciously human-looking pigs of Animal Farm. Though that’s not even allegorically correct, I think they need to see that outside agency was required to bring down the Soviet Union. . . I mean, Animal Farm.

  28. mathew1421 says:

    By the way, I have read several places that the CIA was involved in funding the production of the movie because it was so clearly anti-Stalinist. Have any of you run across that before?

    The whole movie is available, in one file, on Youtube.

    Only the CIA would give pigs big fangs and have a farmer fire five shots from a double-barrelled shotgun. Sheesh.

    The movie is a VERY weird combination of Disney, funny farm animals, and “Reefer Madness” level propaganda.

    Just fucking odd.

  29. Pellegri says:

    @21, Joe: I can’t combine such medication with my other, prescribed meds (and don’t drink anyway for religious reasons), but some days I wonder if it’s not worth the risk.

    Harbrghlr.

  30. Joe says:

    Pellegri, sorry about that.

    I would suggest avoid those lefty comment sections then. They are sure to create complications with your other prescriptions and, as you know already, there is nothing there of worth (at best a lot of unnecessary heartburn).

  31. Timstigator says:

    Amazing how the interwebs have revealed how many commies are in our midst. Here’s to hoping we’re in the Final Battle, he said, pouring himself a four-finger Patron at 10 in the morning.

Comments are closed.