"The Cold War is Not Over: Europe and the Post-Modern Left"

By Mark Brittingham, Ph.D., at The Wild Monk:

The conflict between America and "old" Europe over the war in Iraq has revealed an enormous gap in perception between these erstwhile allies and has led to a furious debate over the implications of this gap in the Post-9/11 world. Speculation abounds regarding the "hidden" motives of the leaders of each of the countries involved in this conflict as people seek to make sense of the depth and vitriol of the conflict. Indeed, in the run-up to war, it was clear that George Bush and Tony Blair could barely comprehend France's resolute opposition to implementing Resolution 1441. Similarly, the depth and size of the anti-American outpouring in Europe seemed to defy all previous conceptions of the relationship between the U.S., Germany and France.

In this article, I argue that George Bush and Tony Blair's appeal to common ideals in their attempt to recruit Europe to the task of reshaping the Middle East is fundamentally mistaken: such common ideals do not exist. Indeed, I will argue that the Cold War is not over, that the U.S. has not won the "war" and that the battles that lie ahead will be far more difficult to pin down than even the asymmetric warfare of the Islamic terrorists. These battles will not be fought with guns and missiles but will take place in the sphere of ideology. The core issue around which these battles will be joined is the very definition of what it means to be a free society. Among the European masses and across the spectrum of academic intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic, the position of classical liberalism — the founding ideology of the United States — has already lost. Thus, while the U.S. has won a protracted battle against one manifestation of a larger philosophical challenge to American political ideals (the "Cold War" against the Soviet Union), it is losing the broader battle taking place in the hearts and minds of people the world over....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 02/23/06 07:27:47 PM
Categorized as More Than Readworthy.

"Gramscian Damage"

By Eric S. Raymond at Armed and Dangerous:

Americans have never really understood ideological warfare. Our gut-level assumption is that everybody in the world really wants the same comfortable material success we have. We use “extremist” as a negative epithetic. Even the few fanatics and revolutionary idealists we have, whatever their political flavor, expect everybody else to behave like a bourgeois.

We don’t expect ideas to matter — or, when they do, we expect them to matter only because people have been flipped into a vulnerable mode by repression or poverty. Thus all our divagation about the “root causes” of Islamic terrorism, as if the terrorists’ very clear and very ideological account of their own theory and motivations is somehow not to be believed.

By contrast, ideological and memetic warfare has been a favored tactic for all of America’s three great adversaries of the last hundred years — Nazis, Communists, and Islamists. All three put substantial effort into cultivating American proxies to influence U.S. domestic policy and foreign policy in favorable directions. Yes, the Nazis did this, through organizations like the “German-American Bund” that was outlawed when World War II went hot. Today, the Islamists are having some success at manipulating our politics through fairly transparent front organizations like the Council on American-Islamic Relations....

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Thu. 02/23/06 07:18:59 PM
Categorized as More Than Blogworthy.