Last week I mentioned a story about a Barrack Obama campaign office in Texas where the Cuban flag was seen by television cameras. Of course, the video clip does not show Obama with a Cuban flag. It merely shows Obama supporters with a Cuban flag. In a related story, when Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega speaks glowingly of Obama’s “revolutionary” campaign, he is not saying that Obama is a Sandinista with good Marxist-Leninist credentials. Ortega merely suggests that Obama’s program is encouraging to Latin American Communists.
Now and again I write a column about the likelihood of nuclear war. Certain readers like to point out, again and again, that nuclear war is not a viable option because of “nuclear winter.” Quite foolishly, I attempt to explain that nuclear winter is not a scientifically valid idea. In fact, it was first put forward in the 1980s as part of a massive KGB disinformation campaign initiated by Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. To confirm the facts in this case, one need only consult a recent book by Pete Earley titled Comrade J. Those readers who believe in nuclear winter, however, refuse to believe that the idea originated as part of a Communist plot.
Many popular ideas concerning the environment, capitalism, rich vs. poor and the American military are false ideas spread by the KGB or Communist front groups. There is an extent to which everyone’s thinking has been influenced by Kremlin disinformation. In fact, public discourse in the United States has been effectively poisoned, over the last six decades, by a series of successful Communist agitation and propaganda campaigns. One of those campaigns managed to convince an overwhelming majority of Americans that Communism is dead.
Whether we are talking about presidential candidates or nuclear war, Americans have ingested so much polemical garbage and disinformation that they are effectively misled on nearly every issue. Our very instincts are confused. Relying on false concepts and bogus facts, we cling to comfortable illusions that affirm a comfortable way of life. After this fashion an entire nation has been put to sleep. Consider the three big lies that everyone accepts without argument: (1) Political subversion does not and cannot take place in America. (2) Russia is not America’s enemy. (3) There is no threat of nuclear war. In support of these three lies we have three misunderstandings: McCarthyism, the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and “nuclear winter.”
The Danish writer Soren Kierkegaard warned that dangerous ideas were beginning to mediate all relationships. He said these ideas would result in something he called “leveling” – a process of gradual social and spiritual destruction. Men were becoming inappropriately reflective, he said. They were not living and learning by their own mistakes. They were abstracting in a way that prevented them from discovering the error of their ways. Subtly corrosive ideas were gently integrated into everyday discourse, even in the 19th century, and few could see the danger in these ideas (e.g., equality, democracy and “the public interest”). The leveling of church, state and culture would occur gradually, without any suspecting that a massively destructive process was underway.
If you look around and see no leveling, then you are probably infected with the dangerous ideas Kierkegaard was writing about over 160 years ago. Today the danger has accelerated. Every outcome is now mediated by sophisticated media images. If ancient democracy gave the Athenians a system in which they could see themselves reflected in their own elected scum, modern democracy presents us with a system in which we are completely taken in by our own wickedness.
False ideas have leveled modern education, leaving us with schools that graduate illiterates. The hollowing-out of our economy is made to look like success. Does anyone believe we have the money to pay for another twenty years of government spending at the established rate of increase? Does anyone really believe that our paper currency is sustainable?
Kierkegaard said that a “sedentary professional people are the first to take up any fantastic illusion which comes their way” and a reflective age “fosters this phantom.” He said that false concepts will triumph over common sense. And that is what leveling signifies in today’s context. We no longer spank our children, revere our ancestors, hang our traitors or identify our enemies. And yet, we still have children, ancestors, traitors and enemies – all of them neglected to one degree or another. For us it is a matter of telling our children they are “special,” delivering our ancestors to the Old Folks Home, debunking the concept of “traitor” with the word “McCarthyism” as we reduce our enemy to a cave-dwelling fundamentalist rabble with box-cutters and airline tickets.
Returning to the book Comrade J, we find that KGB/SVR defector Sergei Tretyakov offered the following urgent correction: “I want to warn Americans. As a people, you are very naïve about Russia and its intentions. You believe because the Soviet Union no longer exists, Russia now is your friend. It isn’t, and I can tell you how the SVR is trying to destroy the U.S. even today and even more than the KGB did during the Cold War.”
Our civilization has reached a stage at which it will not hear realistic talk about powerful enemies. We will not assent to another Cold War for a very logical set of reasons. We will not rethink our false ideas or recognize that our civilization has been inwardly leveled.
