Suicidalism
By Eric S. Raymond
esr.ibiblio.org | September 29, 2005

The most important weapons of al-Qaeda and the rest of the Islamist terror
network are the suicide bomber and the suicide thinker. The suicide bomber
is typically a Muslim fanatic whose mission it is to spread terror; the
suicide thinker is typically a Western academic or journalist or politician
whose mission it is to destroy the West's will to resist not just terrorism
but any ideological challenge at all.

But al-Qaeda didn't create the ugly streak of nihilism and self-loathing
that afflicts too many Western intellectuals. Nor, I believe, is it a
natural development. It was brought to us by Department V of the KGB, which
was charged during the Cold War with conducting memetic warfare that would
destroy the will of the West's intelligentsia to resist a Communist
takeover. This they did with such magnificent effect that the infection
outlasted the Soviet Union itself and remains a pervasive disease of
contemporary Western intellectual life.

Consider the following propositions:

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. [the origin of the left's anti-white Nazism]

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.

These ideas travel under many labels: postmodernism, nihilism,
multiculturalism, Third-World-ism, pacifism, "political correctness" to name
just a few. It is time to recognize them for what they are, and call them by
their right name: suicidalism.

Trace any of these back far enough (e.g. to the period between 1930 and 1950
when Department V was at its most effective) and you'll find a Stalinist at
the bottom. Among the more notorious examples we

Paul de Man - racist and Nazi propagandist turned Stalinist, and fonder of
postmodernism;
Jean-Paul Sartre, who described the effects of Stalinism as "humane terror"
and helped invent existentialism; and Paul Baran, who developed the thesis
that capitalism depended on the immiseration of the Third World after
Marx's immiseration of the proletariat failed to materialize.

Al-Qaeda didn't launch any of these memes into the noosphere, but it relies
on them for political cover. They have another effect as well: when
Islamists characterize the West as "decadent", and is waiting to collapse in
on itself at the touch of jihad, they are describing quite correctly and
accurately the effects of Western suicidalism.

Stalinist agitprop created Western suicidalism by successfully building on
the Christian idea that self-sacrifice (and even self-loathing) are the
primary indicators of virtue.

In this way of thinking, when we surrender our well-being to others we store
up grace in Heaven that is far more important than the momentary discomfort
of submitting to criminals, predatory governments, and terrorists.

The Communist atheists of Department V understood that Christian
self-abnegation tends to inculcate a cult of self-sacrifice even among
Westerners who are themselves agnostics or atheists. All the propagandists
had to do was make the case that the value of self-abnegation applies to
culture as well as individuals. By doing so, they were able to entrench the
idea that suicidalists are morally superior to non-suicidalists.

They did this so successfully that at least one major form of Western
self-abnegation seems to have developed as a secondary phenomenon: "deep
environmentalism". I can't find any sign that this traces back to the usual
Stalinist suspects, but it is rather obviously a result of generalizing
suicidalism not just to culture but to species.

I think it's important to understand that, although suicidalism builds on
some pre-existing pathologies of Western culture, it is not a native or
natural development. It is an infection that evildoers and their dupes
created and then spread as part of a war against the West; their goal was
totalitarian control, and part of their method was to talk the West into
slitting its own throat.

Al-Qaeda's goal is the restoration of the Caliphate and the imposition of
shari'a law on the West so that the Dar al-Harb is abolished and absorbed
into the Dar al-Islam. In other words, totalitarian theocracy. Western
suicidalists have transferred their allegiance from Communism to
Islamofascism without a hitch. They're doing their best to see that we
lose - and their best is rather more effective than any bombing campaign.

Thus, to defeat al-Qaeda, stopping the suicide bombers is not sufficient.
We must recognize, condemn, and reject the suicide thinkers as well.

UPDATE: Readers who think I'm peddling mere conspiracy theory here should
read Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the
Intellectuals for a description of the way KGB disinformation activity,
espionage and memetic warfare fused in the 1930s.

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