From: joedees@bellsouth.net
Date: Sat 03 May 2003 - 03:40:24 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
>
This reminds me of a paper I posted here some time ago. I will repost it
(in two parts).
>
>
> ===============================================================
> This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
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>
===============================================================
This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the
Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission
For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing)
see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit
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