"The European Union is what Americans would call a shotgun marriage," former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky told Paul Belien of The Brussels Journal recently. Belien reports:
In a speech he delivered in Brussels last week Mr Bukovsky called the EU a “monster” that must be destroyed, the sooner the better, before it develops into a full-fledged totalitarian state.
Mr Bukovsky referred to confidential documents from secret Soviet files which he was allowed to read in 1992. These documents confirm the existence of a “conspiracy” to turn the European Union into a socialist organization . . .
The idea was very simple. It first came up in 1985-86, when the Italian Communists visited Gorbachev, followed by the German Social-Democrats. They all complained that the changes in the world, particularly after [British Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher introduced privatisation and economic liberalisation, were threatening to wipe out the achievement (as they called it) of generations of Socialists and Social-Democrats -- threatening to reverse it completely. Therefore the only way to withstand this onslaught of wild capitalism (as they called it) was to try to introduce the same socialist goals in all countries at once.
Echoes of the Gramscian underpinnings of the Soviet Union's insidious infiltration of our own elite institutions last century -- blogged here, here and most recently here, where we cited Eric S. Raymond's checklist of the Soviet Union’s "memetic weapons" of propaganda internalized by our fellow Americans of the left. How would we feel were we to learn that our own political worldview -- in our case Darwinian libertarian -- was the result not of a lifetime of experience, reading, debate and analysis but, rather, the result of a bioterrorist-like attack on our thinking, where a virulent strain of counterintuitive, morally relativistic, international progressivist ideas had been released into the water supply of academic discourse and turned inquiring minds into unwitting servants of a totalitarian impulse?
Update: Roger L. Simon's fisking of the dhimmitude of Newsweek exemplifies Raymond's "memetic weapon" of blaming the victim and forgiving the perpetrator of violence:
I don't know if there is a more fuddy-duddy publication than Newsweek (unless it's Time). Now they are tut-tutting those Europeans who have the temerity -- in the post-cartoon riot world -- to be concerned with protecting free speech and other Enlightenment values through new immigration standards that encourage assimilation. Not surprisingly the Newsweekies title their article The End of Tolerance, meaning Europe's, of course, not those Sharia-bound Muslims whose tolerance is legendary.
Update II: Neo has an excellent post on "Conspiracy theories, Arab and otherwise," but as we said in her comments, "Just because I'm a conspiracy theorist doesn't mean there aren't evil-doers out there trying to take over the world."
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