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To: 1bigdictator
How did good, solid Marxist-Leninist thinking become Wahhabi doctrine? Can you make yourself hate the Arabic Ba'athist political movement as much as you could hate the old-line socialists?
7 posted on 07/31/2002 7:42:07 AM PDT by alloysteel
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To: alloysteel
Similarities, according to this article, derive from the methodology of the expansion of the respective ideologies. Americans should "hate" any ideology, that in practice, is a clear and present threat to our way of life.
8 posted on 07/31/2002 7:59:16 AM PDT by 1bigdictator
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To: alloysteel
How did good, solid Marxist-Leninist thinking become Wahhabi doctrine?

Not doctrine at all, IMHO, but, as the article pointed out, propaganda techniques that, while they were typical of the Soviet efforts, are not unique to any political doctrine. They've been at it awhile - the article notes that the "modern" effort in this regard, i.e. using electronic mass communications, began in the 1960s, but these guys are past masters of mass communications from well before the advent of the radio (at least in that part of the world). What we see here is the old Wahhabbi network of schools (madrassas) receiving a single sermon from a central source and promulgating it across all of Arabic-speaking Islam - the step from that to doing so through radio, television, and now the Internet is merely one of application.

Khomenei, who was neither Wahhabbi nor even Sunni, used simple cassettes to perform this function in Iran in 1978-9, and was successful because that technology had permeated Iranian society, riding the wave of popular music that Iranian theocracy has since tried to suppress, rather unsuccessfully. It seems you can't beat Elvis. Technology that causes the spread of ideas is extremely subversive, as the fax machines that shook the Soviet Union to its core will attest. It is especially subversive to antitechnological theocracies such as the radical Islamic states.

What this means, IMHO, is that while certain educated elites in those states are adept at turning these technologies on its Western inventors, they do so at the peril of its permeation within their own populations. Once that happens, more is communicated than just the party line, and that is very destabilizing to authoritarian states. The Internet will not overthrow the ayatollahs in Iran in this way because the average Iranian does not have a computer. It will subvert, and has subverted, the college campuses.

That is where the Wahhabbis are vulnerable. They have enjoyed a virtual monopoly on popular education up to this point because they are the only game in town, secular public education being understandably low on the priority lists of states to whose rulers it represents danger. "Radio Free Islam" is something we should definitely try; I suspect the rest may take care of itself.

12 posted on 07/31/2002 8:42:12 AM PDT by Billthedrill
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