As the former head of the KGB who later rose to lead the Soviet Union, Andropov embodied the state of terror as no man since Stalin had been able to. A state of terror at home in the Soviet Union meant a secret police and political repression, but as a state of terror abroad, the Soviet Union spread terrorism through bombings and airplane hijackings of American and Israeli targets. The long term goal was to destabilize the Middle East in a way that would make it a particular danger zone for the United States. While the Soviet Union is long gone, the Middle East has long since been a danger zone and continues to become even more dangerous year by year. While the Soviet Union never succeeded in its goal of making the Middle East completely toxic to the United States, the Arab Spring came far closer than many Soviet efforts did in transforming formerly safe countries into hostile territory. The power of disinformation is the power of bad ideas. Bad ideas can linger on even long after those organizations and governments that set them loose have collapsed or dissolved. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion outlived the regime under which it was manufactured. Similarly the Soviet Union’s efforts in the Middle East have outlived the fall of the Berlin Wall, the coup against Gorbachev and the lowering of the red flag over the Kremlin. Bad ideas infect people with a worldview that distorts their actions. They can make self-defense seem like a terrible evil and appeasement seem like the zenith of human civilization. They can turn the most vicious and murderous terrorists into humanitarians and transform actual humanitarians into terrorists. And their existence can only be inferred from their outcomes. Where there is chaos and destruction, malaise, corruption and despair, there the disinformation has done its dreadful work. The Soviet Union may be dead, but like Marx’s specter of Communism wandering across Europe, its bad ideas still haunt and possess many of the leaders of the free world. And when those leaders look out at the world, they don’t do so as Americans, as Frenchmen or Englishmen, but through the tinted red lenses of a dead evil empire. Wherever the disinformation of the Soviet Union spread and wherever its ideas were accepted and came to be seen as mere common sense, there the evil that men do lives on after them.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Jul 2013 15:16:04 +0000