4.4.1Soft powers as subversive ideologies
Concepts!Transnational ideologiesThe following quote summarizes the nature of “Soft powers” or global subversive ideologies.
As I’ve said earlier—soft power is often wrongly defined. Soft power is NOT cultural exports. Power is the ability to influence another’s policies or actions in order to serve one’s interest. Bollywood, K-pop etc. don’t.
So then what is soft power? It is the spread of an ideology such that other states and societies redefine their own interests. It is like a parasite that takes over the host and makes it pursue policies to achieve the normative goals of that ideology, not national interests.
Only two ideologies have that power now—liberalism and Islamism. Christianity did in the colonial era, but lacks that power anymore. The legitimising ideologies of imperial power projection now are only these two.
The techniques of soft power use are the same in both:
Set the ideology as a normative goal
Claim that the current state structure is illegitimate since it doesn’t pursue that goal (“Democracy/secularism in danger!” “Islam in danger!”)
Hence stoke rebellion and legitimise foreign intervention to save what is supposedly in danger. Who does this is a symbiotic relationship of true believers (of liberalism and Islamism) and cynical actors who use this as a way to also pursue national interests (say of US or Iran respectively).
The Iranian regime is a revisionist player which seeks to gain power by subverting other regimes, especially in West Asia, by the use of Islamism as soft power. “look we are standing up for global Islam/Ummah whereas KSA, UAE, Egypt are not”. This way they can rile up the Islamic street in those countries and create revolutions or at least subversion and weaken their rival regimes, apart from hurting their enemies and rivals with terrorism—such as with Hezbollah or Hamas/Brotherhood.
[Comment by NH: This is the only point I disagreed with at the time (and I believe my disagreement has since been proven correct)—Soft Powers usually do not benefit any particular country but are uniformly negative-sum. Iran is in fact an example of a country totally conquered *by* a soft power, not a country cynically using one for its benefit. Iran spilled blood, sacrificed its national interests and future and became a global pariah for the sake of the Palestinian “cause” and Ummah more generally—and the Ummah (Turkey + Western LeLis) repayed them by slaughtering their fellow Shias and toppling their ally in Syria when they were weakened.]
To counter soft power it doesn’t need much state capacity, but does need a lot of state *clarity*. The actions have to do with information and intellectual ecosystems, clamping down on use of non state actors (ranging from NGOs, all the way to terror outfits) etc.
Given India’s unique situation, we have to be aware about both forms of imperial soft power, and vigilant about how we counter each of them, particularly since both are in a tactical alliance in India and our neighbourhood in the subcontinent.
A physics analogy for parasitic ideologies/soft powers—
If you see the world as governed by people/groups maximizing their interests, a lot of evidence appears contradictory.
E.g. big-brain rEaLisTs will tell you that leftist groups are akshually serving GAE/corporations/Christians, but this doesn’t make sense when you realize those groups also act against GAE/corporations/Christians. Whose “interests” are served when Soros funds Rahul Gandhi in India and unleashes criminals onto the streets in America?
Similarly: you start out with a basic kinematic model of the world where the quantity ∑mv2/2 is an important conserved quantity. But then you observe an apple falling toward the earth, contradicting this model.
So to patch this model you introduce the concept of “forces” and “potential energy”, and say that it’s actually ∑mv2/2 + U that is conserved.
The realist big-brainers scoff at you for introducing fudge factors and postulating imaginary things, but you can’t really call it imaginary if its consequences are directly observable before you.
Analogously to account for these “negative-sum” or “irrational” behaviors (from the perspective of pure material self-interest) we must introduce the concept of Subversive Ideologies into our framework.
This ultimately is the correct formulation of the “globalism” meme. We must distinguish the following forms of cosmopolitanism:
Globalization, a purely economic thing and generally good.
Cosmopolitanism, a tool of any empire. This empire could be the Left-liberal Rāj (bad) or our Nation (good). At a global scale this is “Internationalism” or now-called “Globalism” because the LeLi Rāj is a global empire.
Democratic Cosmopolitanism, i.e. mass-immigration plus democracy plus citizenship plus welfare state, which is liked by the Left when it enables ethnic gibs-seeking which can be used to indefinitely generate oppressed noble savages everywhere.
Transnational ideologies, of which Left-liberalism is one.
4.4.2Is the Indian Left/Congress uniquely treasonous?
People often say: “The Indian Left is uniquely treasonous” compared to all the other Left-wing movements of the world, or that they are “brown sepoys”. I have a slightly different opinion.In every country (not only India), Left/liberals see their “nation’s interests” as subservient to (or even actively harmful) the interests of their Ideology. Similarly radical Islamists in Iran or Pakistan see their nation’s interests as inherently subservient to the interests of the Ummah—this is why they adopt such “suicidal” policies.
The thing though is that these countries have been so thoroughly conquered by the Subversive Ideologies that we no longer even make the distinction between “the ideology’s interests” and “their nation’s interests”. It’s like how people say “the Mughals became Indian”. Did their ideology change (apart from one Akbar’s apostasy), did their extractive and oppressive methods change? No—they simply became the reigning power that people stopped referring to them as invaders.
Whereas India is one of the unique countries that is no longer so thoroughly conquered by either Subversive Ideology—it stood as the last fortress against Islam, and over the past 45 years it has gradually worked its way out of the grasp of Left-liberalism (see section B.1.8). It still maintains some semblance of sovereignty, in large part because Hindutva acts as a genuine indigenous alternative to the Global Leftist Ideological Aether.
This means we can still conceive of an “Indian national interest”—something we cannot do for vassals of the Left-liberal Rāj or Ummah—and Congress, as the vehicle of the two globalist ideologies, becomes the enemy of this Indian national interest.
It is similar to the perception that “India was often conquered in history”. Whereas in reality what’s going on here is that other nations were so thoroughly conquered we forget that they even had an identity before it.
“Theft” only means anything when property exists, “adultery” only means anything when marriage exists, and “treason” only means anything when sovereignty exists.