PSYWAR on Two Fronts, Part 1
January 19, 2011 10:01 PM
Is the Cold War really over? That is a question too rarely asked. For the increasing number of potential readers of this weblog who were born too late to remember the Cold War, it was "a protracted geopolitical, ideological, and economic struggle that emerged after World War II between the global superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States" (Wikipedia.) The Cold War is said to have ended when the Soviet Union dissolved. If all wars are to be defined by the nationality of the combatants, that conclusion might be satisfactory. However, since the Soviet Union was extraordinary for modern times in its use of spies, saboteurs, infiltrators, fifth columnists, and client state allies such as Cuba and North Korea, a case can be made that the Soviet Union lives on in the "hearts and minds" of many of its admirers around the world, including in all 50 of the united States. I am going to make that case here and now.
The DOD (Department of Defense) of the federal United States government uses a term PSYWAR, an abbreviation for "psychological warfare," which the DOD defines as:
"The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives."
If the Soviet Union is seen as the primary "hostile foreign group" to which the definition refers, then the united States are fighting a PSYWAR against a ghost. In one sense, they are: ghosts are said to appear and disappear, to walk through walls, and to haunt the living. The intellectual "ghosts" of the Soviet Union are doing just that.
However, there are at least three hostile nations against which the united States of America appear in the news to be fighting a PSYWAR: North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela. Then we have the People's Republic of China, once a client state of the Soviet Union, now an imperial power implementing fascist policies while mouthing socialist slogans. (The day I am writing this, US President Barack Hussein Obama is wining and dining the supreme dictator of that People's Republic.) US politicians since Nixon have seen fit to engage in short-term opportunism with Chinese communists, while the latter are engaging in a long term-strategy to take over the world, diminishing the USA in the process. (That very short-term opportunism, by the way, is one of the reasons I have named this weblog Impeach Them All.)
The title of today's blogpost refers to a PSYWAR "on two fronts." The phrase actually has several meanings, the most obvious of which is psychological warfare against the intellectual "ghosts" and surviving client states of the Soviet Union (one front), and the militant Islamists (Salafis) allied with Iranian "revolutionary" mullahs (the other.)
In a narrower sense, PSYWAR "on two fronts" can refer to an ideological war between the advocates of what i call the Three C's - Constitution, Capitalism, and Currency - against the Bolshevik ideologues of the self-styled Left, who have hijacked the "Democratic" Party, the public schools, the universities, and the "mainstream" media (the first front), and the Republican "establishment" hacks and public officials struggling for crumbs from the "Democrat" loot (the other.) In this series of blogposts I plan to write about the two fronts in both senses.
Any nation fighting on two fronts is under great stress, and so are we. But our ideological ancestors at Valley Forge were under much more stress, and we must take inspiration from their example.