I don’t think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn’t help.
A better example to answer Tim’s question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.
Don’t get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond’s narrative.
First, his ideological concept of “suicidalism” is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology—with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic—and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.
(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a good target for propagandistic attack because it superficially looks bad from the liberal point of view. Of course, they never managed to fool anyone of any consequence this way, it and just makes them look like clowns to anyone but their own choir to whom they are preaching.)
Second, I think that a correct historical analysis would show that Soviet subversion—in the sense of subversion planned and directed from Moscow—was by no means unimportant, but not of such central and exclusive importance as Raymond believes. Furthermore, it’s very simplistic to believe that whenever some ideological interaction and intermixing occurred, it was just diabolically clever Russians duping their Western useful idiots. Plenty of that happened, of course, but the overall picture is much more complex than that. The story of the cooperation and mutual ideological influence between the Soviet and American elites was definitely not simple and unidirectional.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way. But as it is, it has serious flaws.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way.
At that point, I’m not sure that there’s anything left of the article that isn’t better stated by you in this comment here. In short, the whole purpose of the article was to rant (which is problematic for exactly the reasons you described).
I don’t think this is a good place to start. While Raymond is mostly correct in the particular facts he points out, his overall picture is ill-informed and misleading. His ranting style also doesn’t help.
A better example to answer Tim’s question would be the fall of China to Mao, discussed in this Overcoming Bias post.
Could you go into more details on what you think is wrong with his overall picture.
Don’t get me wrong, the basic story about the Soviet-directed subversion is true and well-attested by testimonies of Soviet defectors. However, there are two major problems with Raymond’s narrative.
First, his ideological concept of “suicidalism” is highly contrived and detached from reality on a number of points. Raymond starts from his own libertarian ideology—with which I in fact have some sympathy, but which is in his case very nerdy and simplistic—and then he takes a caricatured version of every opinion he disagrees with, and amalgamates all this. Now, I do think a correct analysis along these lines could be done (i.e. reducing the dominant ideology in the modern West to a list of principles, some of which need to be only stated plainly to see how pernicious they are). However, I think Raymond fails in this task, being driven by the desire to see something as close as possible to a simple evil inversion of his own principles.
(He also displays a trait common among modern libertarians and conservatives that I find indescribably irritating. Namely, they often scour the rhetoric of liberals and then exclaim in triumph when they find something that seems like a good target for propagandistic attack because it superficially looks bad from the liberal point of view. Of course, they never managed to fool anyone of any consequence this way, it and just makes them look like clowns to anyone but their own choir to whom they are preaching.)
Second, I think that a correct historical analysis would show that Soviet subversion—in the sense of subversion planned and directed from Moscow—was by no means unimportant, but not of such central and exclusive importance as Raymond believes. Furthermore, it’s very simplistic to believe that whenever some ideological interaction and intermixing occurred, it was just diabolically clever Russians duping their Western useful idiots. Plenty of that happened, of course, but the overall picture is much more complex than that. The story of the cooperation and mutual ideological influence between the Soviet and American elites was definitely not simple and unidirectional.
That said, there is much that is perfectly correct in Raymond’s article, and it would be a good reference if it were written in a more cautious and less ranting way. But as it is, it has serious flaws.
Well said.
At that point, I’m not sure that there’s anything left of the article that isn’t better stated by you in this comment here. In short, the whole purpose of the article was to rant (which is problematic for exactly the reasons you described).
Thanks. Leaving out your ideological statements and some other contrarian things, much of that was my impression of the article as well.