The pernicious effect of Soviet propaganda.

By Ted Belman

The Goldberg File is written by Jonah Golberg and published by the NRO. I have extracted a certain segment of this week’s issue dealing with the pernicious effect of Soviet propaganda.  Arafat and Abbas were schooled in Soviet methodology which they put to good use in their efforts to establish a new reality in their war against Israel.  To Israel’s chagrin, they have been successful beyond their wildest dreams.

[..] 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.

Not mentioned in this abstract is the use of terror. Terror is a tool not only to intimidate your target but also to get world recognition for your cause. Arafat instigated plane hijackings and airport attacks throughout the seventies. Abbas was instigator of the Munich massacre which murdered 11 Israeli athletes at the Olympics in 1972.

Without regard to such atrocities or perhaps because of them, Arafat was invited to speak at the United Nations in 1974. Its been downhill for Israel since then. The torrent of lies and misinformation, spread by useful idiots, antisemites, NGO’s and Muslim leaders, particularly Arafat and Abbas and their minions, aided and abetted by the UN, the EU, the US and leftists, including Israeli leftists, have subjected Israel to a perfect storm.

Israel was not up to the challenge posed by these forces and still isn’t. Part of the reason for their success is that Israel has been AWOL. She refuses to take the initiative and go on the offense. Her posture is defensive when offense is needed. She constantly apologizes when no apology is called for. She begs for negotiations and even pays exorbitantly for them. She violates her own red lines time and again. She fails to make maximalist demands and acts like she doesn’t have a winning case. She is intimidated by the threat of riots on the temple mount and elsewhere and so concedes her rights and the rights of Jews without even a fight. She fails to uphold the law when it comes to the Arabs and allows thousands of illegal Arab homes to be built. Even in cases where she has been granted demolition orders, she doesn’t enforce them. She failed to take notice of the African migrants that were infiltrating her borders until there were 70,000 of them. She tolerates outrageous activities of left wing NGO’s aimed at undermining the state. She tolerates the gross interference in her affairs by European countries who finance these NGO’s and finance the illegal Arab construction in violation of the Oslo Accords. Although she annexed land on the east side of Jerusalem she doesn’t act like the sovereign there. Instead she takes orders from Washington as to what she can built there.

Unfortunately the list is endless. Get off the floor and fight.