Tim Bray summarizes: (via Reddit)
ESR has cracked up. It’s kind of sad, Eric Raymond was one of my major influences with his essays on the culture and economics of Open Source. I didn’t always agree, but they were closely-argued and made you really think hard. Now he stands on his blog platform and argues that we’re in danger of surrendering to Al-Qaeda because of… wait for it… after-effects of the work done by Department V of the KGB, especially between 1930 and 1950.
Damn Commies!
Yeah. I was reading the Freepers t’other day and it hit me how similar past wingnut Commie rhetoric sounds like the contemporary “Islamofascist” variety.
Sadly, this sort of rhetoric it’s not all that different from the demonization of ‘The Internal Enemy’ perpetrated by the very Stalinists ESR so despises.
You put forth your strawman argument: “Trotsky is a revisionsist”, “Jews are following the Protocols of Zion”, “All liberals hate America”, then make sure it’s said loud and often, drowning out the other voices. Eventually enough people believe it’s true, you can do what you want.
Osama bin Laden didn’t attack us because he thought we were weak, he attacked us because he hates us, we are The Enemy in his twisted world-view, much as Liberals seem to be in ESR’s. We haven’t won ‘the war agin terrah’ because we’re weak , we haven’t won because ‘The more you tighten your grip, the more systems slip through your fingers, Lord Vader’.
Our enemy is diffuse, patient, and largely invisible to our eyes. The only way to win is to convince the poeple to whom they are NOT invisible that their interests lie with us rather than the terrorists.
Whether ESR wants to belive it or not, US foreign policy, our long record of despoiling their homes (calling it “The Third World” makes it sound much more abstract than “stealing their resources and oppressing their lives”) and our ham-fisted attempts at Imperialism ARE what is keeping those peope who know the terrorists from joining us against them.
The endless right-wing noise machine does this very well, and the polarization they’re perpetuating in our society is as dangerous ay other brand of fanaticism.
That said, Eric’s always been batshit crazy wrt politics. To him Might Makes Right, no matter how he dresses it up in Libertarian drag.