Here's Andrews Sullivan quoting The Guardian:
Read this story and get a little worried. The British authorities deserve huge levels of praise for foiling this plot. But here's the worrying and significant part:
Those arrested were all born and brought up in Britain. Security sources played down suggestions of any direct link between the arrested men and al-Qaida. Sources referred to groups of young radicalised Muslims who were "difficult to label" but viciously anti-western. Security sources suggested that the motive of the alleged planned attacks was anti-western but not dictated by anyone in the al-Qaida hierarchy.
We are fixated on Osama bin Laden. But a single individual isn't responsible. And not even an organization is responsible. The responsibility ultimately falls on the individuals carrying out the killing, of course, but even that responsibility is limited. The fact is that their minds are strongly under the influence of the meme-complex which is fundamentalist Islam.
In earlier centuries, certain classes of Christians were just as hateful. It has little to do with Islam, but of the particular strain of the evolving Islamic meme-complex which embraces an absolute literal belief in the "truth" of the Koran and of the words of those who are its teachers, together with a belief that Western society is evil and to blame for the problems faced by people in Islamic societies. Most, if not all, religions are capable of developing such strains. (Even Buddhism.)
If Osama bin Laden was captured tomorrow, people like the British group that was arrested this week would still be doing what they are doing because of the memes in their heads.
Ergo, if we want to change things, we need to change the memes. And it will involve a lot more than the primitive attempts at changing perceptions through "propoganda" which have been tried by humanity so far. And if we want to change things before nuclear or extremely effective biological weapons get into the hands of such people, we'd better succeed at repairing the situation quickly.
Ultimately there is no other answer than to create meme-complexes that are more emotionally compelling than the ones being spread in violently fundamentalist Islam, and that may spread into the minds of those who might otherwise embrace violently fundamentalist Islam. And to somehow promote the propagation of those meme-complexes from mind to mind.
Ultimately, this is a major part of the Bush administration's strategy. If they can create a happy democracy in Iraq, then the meme-complex that is Western-style democracy will have a much easier path than it has ever had to gain a foothold in the minds of young Muslims. (Note that of course Western-style democracy doesn't contradict Islam any more than it contradicts Christianity. It just creates an alternative path to being able to feel hope, compared to living a life of hate-filled fundamentalism. One that has many advantages. In fact, one could argue that the reason we haven't seen Christian equivalents of suicide bombers is because most Christians live in Western-style democracies, where they don't need dreams of reward in heaven in order to have hope; they have it in their day-to-day lives.)
The alternative track to introducing benevolent meme-complexes, in order to obviate the need for meme-complexes that encourage suicide bombing, is to create an alternative meme-complex that is more emotionally attractive, and which is highly resistant to evolving in directions that support violence. I have argued that the huge-scale communication that is made possible by the Internet may make it possible to do that more effectively and more powerfully than was never the case before. This would in effect mean using massive two-way communication as the substrate for the evolution of something that would be, in effect, an alternative religion. This "religion" would undoubtedly have the aim of better enabling people to find satisfaction through spiritual means. That's a very interesting subject in itself and well beyond the scope of the present essay.
But I must admit there are advantages to the approach Bush is taking. A meme-complex of Western-style democracy which gets its strength from actually helping Muslims have better lives than they can in a dictatorship will be deeply empowered by its actual efficacy in helping people improve their lot. On the other hand, of course there are well-known disadvantages to the Bush approach. For one thing, before the "good" meme-complex has had a chance to take hold, fundamentalist Muslims may win out and enable the creation of a fundamentalist Muslim dictatorship in Iraq. Of course that's only one of many dangers.
(Note that the approach of trying to use technology and mass communication to help generate an alternative highly attractive and benevolent meme-complex also has a profound danger. If such a meme-complex did take hold, there might be no way to stop it from mutating into an even more dangerous meme-complex than the worst we are seeing now.)
Whatever we try will be dangerous. But we must do something. The alternative is to believe that violence-promoting religions will disappear if America and other Western-style democracies behave in "kinder, gentler" ways in the world.
That viewpoint says that we are hated for good reasons, not because of irrational meme-complexes. If we are hated for such good reasons, then the way to fix the problem is to stop doing the bad things we are doing. If we are hated because of irrational meme-complexes, then we need to undermine those meme-complexes, as Bush hopes to do by creating a successful democracy in Iraq.
Those are very different ways of seeing the situation, and I think are at the bottom of the profound disagreements Americans have on the issue of Iraq.
Perhaps we can look to the past for guidance; specifically, World War II.
Once Nazism reached critical mass (in the form of a government run by Hitler and a population that largely accepted that rule), "being nice" to Germany was not the best approach. At that point, we had to fight. There was simply no other way. It took a very long time for most people in power to realize that fact (Churchill, of course, was the most notable exception). No, being nice to Germany after the Anschluss was not a good idea. The meme-complex that Germans were racially superior and needed to manifest that superiority by turning Jews and Gypsies into corpses, and citizens of neighboring countries such as Poland into "domestic servants" who would be shipped into the Fatherland against their will to perform that function, had taken hold. It was going to play itself out no matter how nice we were. We did try the approach of being nice, but it really, really didn't work. 40 million people died as a result of that miscalculation, since we could have stopped Hitler very early had we the will to do so.
On the other hand, it is true that Nazism didn't rise in a vacuum. The Germans had a reason to be bitter about their treatment at the hands of the rest of the world. After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles had required Germany to pay "reparations" that were far too heavy; cripplingly heavy. It was a kind of revenge, and it caused Germans and Germany to suffer economically at the hands of other nations until the Nazis took over. It is the bitterness caused by those hardships which was the energy that fueled Nazism's rise to critical mass.
There appears to be little doubt that most individuals who live in Muslim nations are economically worse off economically than most individuals living in Europe in America. And there is no doubt that there is bitterness about it. And there is little doubt that that bitterness is part of what is fueling the rise of fundamentalist Islam. But is it like the case of the Treaty of Versailles, where some parties are actively inflicting this disadvantage upon the others? Or does it have to do with something else -- for instance, is it possible that societies where people are free to pursue whatever ideas they want are more conducive to bettering people's lives than fundamentalist dictatorships are?
The bottom line for me is this: I don't know of any evidence that we would obstruct the creation of free states in Muslim lands that would support the promotion of ideas and free expression that would enable them to be economically competitive with us. (In fact, I believe we are doing our best to enable such a state to appear in Iraq.) And when such a state appears, I have no reason to think it will be economically worse off than other freedom-promoting states such as the U.S. and the European democracies. (If you have such a reason, let me know.)
Indeed, not many decades ago, Japan was a dictatorship living under the fundamentalist belief that its ruler was of divine origin. That state was beaten by us in war, and we created a freedom-supporting democracy there, and it is now one of the world's great economic powers. So is Germany in the aftermath of its defeat and our subsequent creation of a freedom-promoting state there.
So, we want Muslims in the mideast to be doing well. We want them to be doing as well as Japan and Germany did after their dictatorships were destroyed. Many assume that we want them at a disadvantage, but I see no evidence of that, least of all in the actions we have undertaken in Iraq.
This is why I am in favor of doing what we are doing in Iraq, even with the knowledge that it may not work -- we may fail at creating the state we want to create. It's a huge danger -- but the alternatives of doing nothing, or believing we can solve the problem by being "nice", are even worse.
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