by Jonah Goldberg
It’s fitting that Carney is a collector of Soviet propaganda posters. After all, Soviet agitprop was arguably the best example of extreme confidence married to total implausibility since I tried to change my pants without taking off my shoes. Obviously, I am bringing up Carney’s ownership of Soviet propaganda posters more as a means of forcing a transition to a new topic than as any attempt to label Carney a Bolshevik (“Transparency!” — The Couch).
Lots of people have noted that Vladimir Putin is using the KGB playbook in his effort to carve up Ukraine. That involves not only lying, but manipulating events in such a way so as to make it easier for others to believe the lies. Anne Applebaum describes the techniques very well. Lots of people have discussed how Russia Today is a pigpen for Russian propagandists providing a useful slop trough for modern-day useful idiots.
But what hasn’t been discussed is what all of this talk about “KGB tactics” suggests about the past, and our understanding of it. Anyone roughly my age or older (“Ah yes, you are the measure of man!” — The Couch) probably remembers how the Soviets and their defenders used to bend and manipulate logic, facts, and truth to make it seem like there was a plausible case that the Soviet Union had the better economic and social model. But what is less well-remembered among older folks and completely unknown to most younger folks is the damage done by the Soviets to our understanding of the world.
For instance, the Soviets are the foremost authors the idea that “Zionism equals racism.” They championed this idea without any regard for the truth, never mind any concern about the evils of racism — the Soviet regime was remarkably racist (as was Marx himself, and their fight against racism was entirely tactical). Many of the old-guard Palestinian leadership were weaned on Soviet propaganda. Mahmoud Abbas has a Ph.D. from Moscow’s Patrice Lumumba University (stop laughing!). His thesis: “The Other Side: the Secret Relationship Between Nazism and Zionism.” The Soviets — and other Communist regimes — cultivated front groups who spread lies about how the American government created AIDS, distributed crack in inner cities, and countless other stories that still survive in America and abroad as vague half-truths, urban legends, and secrets “no one wants you to know.” Not everyone who spread this stuff was a paid propagandist. Many didn’t even know anyone was pulling their strings, and if they did know, many wouldn’t care because they assumed the Communists were the good guys.
And those are just the crazy left-wingers. Countless liberals still embrace various ideas that are the diluted legacy of Soviet and Marxist slander. As I argue (I’d even say demonstrate) in Liberal Fascism, the whole idea that Communism and fascism have absolutely no common intellectual heritage or other meaningful similarities is wholly a product of Soviet (and at times Nazi) propaganda (that the Putinistas are trotting out the “we’re a popular front against fascists” talking point is quite revealing). Stalin’s theory of social fascism was a propaganda tool. It didn’t become any less of one because a lot of decent, mainstream liberals bought into it. To the contrary, it proved how successful that propaganda effort was.
The Soviet legacy in Africa is especially dismaying because their deceit poisoned the minds of some of the best and brightest and probably delayed development by at least a generation. (When I briefly lived in Prague, you could still find African students and intellectuals who took the whole raft of Soviet propaganda very seriously.)
Anyway, I wrote about this in the Corner five years ago when Obama said that nuclear weapons were the Cold War’s “most dangerous legacy.” I said nukes aren’t the most dangerous legacy, the half-life of Soviet lies are:
Some might say the military-industrial complex or the national-security state. But not me. To me, the most obvious dangerous legacy of the Cold War would have to be the damage the Soviets did to the world. I don’t mean the millions they murdered; those dead do not threaten us now, even if they should haunt us.
I mean the relentless distortion of the truth, the psychological violence they visited on the West and the World via their useful idiots and their agents. I’m thinking not merely of the intellectual corruption of the American Left (which even folks like Richard Rorty had to concede), but the corruption of reformers and their movements around the globe. Soviet propaganda still contaminates, while nuclear fallout does not. Lies about America, the West, and the nature of democratic capitalism live on throughout the third world and in radioactive pockets on American campuses.
The Soviet effort to foster wars of national liberation, to poison the minds of the “Bandung Generation,” to deracinate cultures from their own indigenous building blocks of democracy, to destroy non-Marxist competitors interested in reform, to create evil and despotic regimes that are seen as “authentic” because they represent the “true will” of their subjugated and beaten down peoples: these seem to me to amount to the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War. Not least because it was those sorts of efforts that gave birth to North Korea in the first place.
http://www.nationalreview.com/node/377126/print
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