Posted on 09/16/2001 9:12:08 PM PDT by cicero's_son
The great Marxist tactician Antonio Gramsci was, fortunately for the West, never recognized as Communism's greatest talent. Had Lenin, Stalin et alia caught onto Gramsci's brilliance earlier, the war against Communism might have gone differently.
Gramsci's key insight was the marriage of Hegelian dialectic theory to communism revolution. By introducing "agents of change" into Western institutions who were really sleepers for the communist cause, he would weaken the very institutions that guaranteed the West's moral and philosophical stability.
Even though we whipped Communism, the toxic effects of Gramscism linger. Our churches are cheerleading organizations for dictators like Castro. Our universities are more hostile to western ideals than the worst enclaves of Radical Islam. Our entertainment and popular culture? The process of recovery will take decades.
So it bears asking, how would Gramsci handle radical Islam?
Would he seed the Middle East with sleeper imams, friendly to Western goals? Would he introduce agents of change into these societies to reconstruct their value systems? Would he set up new Islamic academies, where the curriculum is friendly to the West?
This will be a total war. Let's learn from our previous enemies, and ask ourselves "What Would Gramsci Do?"
We need to infiltrate the enemy's core institutions--the Islamic academies and the radical mosques themselves--and weaken them structurally.
I thought that was one of their major complaints against us ... we had exported porn, women's rights, individual liberty and freedom, etc. into their culture.
But the imports you describe (porn, women's rights, etc.) are manifestly alien and therefore easily rejected.
Gramscianism is subtler than that. It feels natural and good. It feel like an organic development.
But I'd prefer not to have the "fallout" contaminate the post-radical Islam world. Do we really want 1 billion porn-addled Arabs?
Probably. The sad thing is that in order to render Moslems harmless we must "corrupt" them with Yankee materialism.
I have rather limited knowledge of the region, but it seems to me that the model to consult for this might by Kemal Attaturk, who succeeded in modernising (and SECULARISING) Turkey.
One way or the other (as I have suggested on other threads), the real enemy in all of this is Sharia -- the strict collaboration of Koran ethics with the power of state enforcement. It is theocracy in a very literal sense, and it creates the atmosphere in which people like Osama and his followers were indoctrinated. Regardless of whether the Saudis are our "friends", this system must GO, the same way Japanese Emperor-worship, German National Socialism, and Russian Communism had to go. The human community cannot afford to tolerate any more incubators of terrorism. Islamic radicalism must be stamped out just as the Thuggee cult was eradicated in India. And its clerics must be branded as international war criminals and denied aid and asylum throughout the world.
So the first step is to eliminate the radical clergy. The second step is to introduce the Madison Avenue marketing experts, and inundate local society with pervasive exposure to the American idea of the good life. Subvert the strict interpretations of the Koran by a steady dosage of "higher criticism" in the colleges, so that the seminaries will produce lax, latitudinarian clerics. Expose the children to the temptations of moral laxity through incessant MTV. Tempt them to prefer comfort and gratification to discipline and virtue. In other words, turn them into the worst sort of Americans.
Perhaps it would be more merciful, after all, if we just nuked them.
The strategy of guerillas is to heat things up to the point where the ruling power comes down so hard, that the locals feel compelled to join the guerrillas. Terror is also employed by the guerrillas against the local population to facilitate this. The local elites throw in with the guerrillas or perhaps with us or emigrate -- in any even they cease to be a major factor and our "Gramscian" strategy becomes useless. We aren't dealing with guerrillas, but the strategy of the terrorists could be the same.
Bear in mind, too, that the "Gramscian" strategy will also be employed against us. Maybe "Gramscian" isn't quite the right term for what North Vietnam did or didn't do, but they were more successful at winning over American elites than we were at winning over -- certainly North Vietnamese elites -- but in the end perhaps South Vietnamese elites as well. Colin Powell's argument for limited and winnable engagements is still wise.
If you are interested in strategy, you should see this.
I tend to agree, but then again it isn't really about mercy, is it? It's about conquest--in this case conquest of the spirit.
There are other weapons in our arsenal besides Western materialism. Sufism, for one. It's the antinomian mode in Islamic society, and it exists (however tenuously) outside of Sharia.
Then there is the greatest weapon of all: the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Evangelical Christianity is the fastest growing religion in the world today, and it is taking the majority of its growth in Africa and in the Catholic heartland of Latin America. Perhaps they can turn their attentions to the more fertile and less damaging (to the West) ground of the Islamic Middle East.
No argument on that. In fact, I think of the Gramscian assault on the West beginning in the 1960's as a sort of philosophical Pearl Harbor. Our great institutions are still smouldering, buckling, and threatening collapse.
That said, I see encouraging signs. For one thing, the fall of the Soviet empire stripped the mask off of Communism forever. Even our elites can no longer deny that Stalin was a brutal mass murderer, that the Soviets exported bloody revolution, and that we were truly in a death struggle against an Evil Empire. Without a true Antipode to which to anchor the Gramscian assault, the strategy began to crumble. Today, I believe that we will recover.
And in a way, we may come out of it better for the experience. My theory is that we are partially innoculated against this strategy now. The Islamic world has never seen an assault like this before.
As opposed to the current situation? YES!
How so? Because communism collapsed like a folding umbrella before our eyes?
Deception strategy.
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