From: Dace (edace@earthlink.net)
Date: Sat 03 May 2003 - 01:19:33 GMT
> From: Keith Henson <hkhenson@rogers.com>
>
> Joe Dees wrote
>
> >Hokay. I would just like to point out that the US had to play dirty pool
> >with friendly dictators in order to effectively contend with the Soviet
bloc
> >in the world arena, where they were doing the same thing in spades.
>
> To point this discussion back to memes, particularly *religious memes*
what
> went on between the Soviet bloc and the rest of the world was really a
> religious war--against communism. I think it will eventually be
recognized
> that communism was in competition for the religious meme receptor site in
> human mental "space" and that the wars were a continuation of a very long
> series of religious wars.
Dug up this quote from Toynbee, *A Study of History* (abridged, 1947) Part
V, pp 399-400:
If Karl Marx had been challenged by some Victorian censor morum to give his
spiritual name and address, he would have described himself as a disciple of
the philosopher Hegel, applying the Hegelian dialectic to the economic and
political phenomena of his day. But the elements that have made Communism
an explosive force are not of Hegel's creation; they bear on their face
their certificate of origin from the ancestral religious faith of the West--
a Christianity which, three hundred years after the philosophic challenge
from Descartes, was still being drunk in by every Western child with its
mother's milk and inhaled by every Western man and woman with the air they
breathed. And such elements as cannot be traced to Christianity can be
traced to Judaism, the "fossilized" parent of Christianity which had been
preserved by a Jewish Diaspora and volatilized through the opening of the
ghettos and the emancipation of Western Jewry in the generation of Marx's
grandparents. Marx has taken the goddess "Historical Necessity" in place of
Yahweh for his deity, and the internal proletariat of the Western World in
place of Jewry for his chosen people, and his Messianic Kingdom is conceived
of as a Dictatorship of the Proletariat; but the salient features of the
Jewish Apocalypse protrude through this threadbare disguise.
However, it looks as if the religious phase in the evolution of Communism
may prove ephemeral. The conservative national Communism of Stalin seems to
have decisively defeated the revolutionary oecumenical Communism of Trotsky
in the Russian field.
[endquote]
Without the meme, communism ran out of steam.
Ted
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