On this blog we’ve talked many times about the Gramscian march, the slow and steady and dedicated work of the left on the hearts and minds of Americans. This work has borne tremendous fruit, and may have reached a critical mass among the younger generation.

Much of this work was originally generated by the Soviets, who understood that the mind is a powerful weapon, and that influencing American thought over the years would be crucial.

So I recommend this piece, which although old (written over 13 years ago) was linked today by Instapundit. A few excerpts:

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.

I would observe that although the Nazis were rather poor at it—their philosophy didn’t travel all that well, being based on (among other things) the tremendous supposed superiority of the Germans— the Communists and the Islamists (who are sometimes allied despite their differences, because after all they have some of the same enemies) have been remarkably successful.

Especially the Communists:

The Soviets had an entire “active measures” department devoted to churning out anti-American dezinformatsiya… …[Here are] some of the most important of the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons…: —There is no truth, only competing agendas.

—All Western (and especially American) claims to moral superiority over Communism/Fascism/Islam are vitiated by the West’s history of racism and colonialism.

—There are no objective standards by which we may judge one culture to be better than another. Anyone who claims that there are such standards is an evil oppressor.

—The prosperity of the West is built on ruthless exploitation of the Third World; therefore Westerners actually deserve to be impoverished and miserable.

—Crime is the fault of society, not the individual criminal. Poor criminals are entitled to what they take. Submitting to criminal predation is more virtuous than resisting it.

—The poor are victims. Criminals are victims. And only victims are virtuous. Therefore only the poor and criminals are virtuous. (Rich people can borrow some virtue by identifying with poor people and criminals.)

—For a virtuous person, violence and war are never justified. It is always better to be a victim than to fight, or even to defend oneself. But ‘oppressed’ people are allowed to use violence anyway; they are merely reflecting the evil of their oppressors.

—When confronted with terror, the only moral course for a Westerner is to apologize for past sins, understand the terrorist’s point of view, and make concessions.

We have become all too familiar with these principles as the years go on and we see them demonstrated by the left time and again.

Most were staples of Soviet propaganda at the same time they were being promoted by “progressives” (read: Marxists and the dupes of Marxists) within the Western intelligentsia… This worked exactly as expected; their memes seeped into Western popular culture and are repeated endlessly in (for example) the products of Hollywood. Indeed, the index of Soviet success is that most of us no longer think of these memes as Communist propaganda. It takes a significant amount of digging and rethinking and remembering, even for a lifelong anti-Communist like myself, to realize that there was a time (within the lifetime of my parents) when all of these ideas would have seemed alien, absurd, and repulsive to most people — at best, the beliefs of a nutty left-wing fringe, and at worst instruments of deliberate subversion intended to destroy the American way of life.

To that last part, I would add that many of the people now pushing these ideas are unaware of their origins, as well. Those of us who oppose them may not know the exact origin of each thought, but we certainly know their far-leftist and often Soviet provenance, as well as the intensity of the Soviet desire to “bury” us.

The essay continues:

The most paranoid and xenophobic conservatives of the Cold War were, painful though this is to admit, the closest to the truth in estimating the magnitude and subtlety of Soviet subversion.

And note this, and recall that it was written early in 2006 [emphasis mine]:

In this context, Jeff Goldstein has written eloquently about perhaps the most long-term dangerous of these memes — the idea that rights inhere not in sovereign individuals but identity groups, and that every identity group (except the “ruling class”) has the right to suppress criticism of itself through political means up to and including violence. The Soviets didn’t invent it, but they promoted it heavily in a deliberate — and appallingly successful — attempt to weaken the Lockean, individualist tradition that underlies classical liberalism and the U.S. Constitution. The reduction of Western politics to a bitter war for government favor between ascriptive identity groups is exactly the outcome the Soviets wanted and worked hard to arrange.

Mission accomplished, at least on the Democratic side. And the left would like to label everything that has occurred lately on the right as an example of that same struggle, with Republicans representing the evils of “white supremacy” (which would be that “except the ‘ruling class'” exception referred to in the excerpt).

I know a great many liberals. And I would guess that, although most of them ascribe to the principles on that list of “the Soviet Union’s memetic weapons,” they are unaware that what they are espousing is far leftist propaganda, and remain ignorant even now of its origins and purpose.

And if I were to send them a link to this particular post, they would think I’d gone bonkers.