Subject: Memetic Warfare?

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15984

"In the early 1980s I happened to attend, at a Conservative Political Action conference in Washington, a session called "Rolling Back the Soviet Empire." One of the speakers that day was a kind of adventurer-slash-ideologue named Jack Wheeler, who was very much of the moment because he had always just come back from spending time with our freedom fighters in Afghanistan, also known as the Mujahideen. I recall that he received a standing ovation after urging that copies of the Koran be smuggled into the Soviet Union to "stimulate an Islamic revival" and the subsequent "death of a thousand cuts."

I have long thought that warfare via the engineering of meme-complexes is something that should be taken very seriously. I don't think traditional propaganda efforts do nearly as much as can ultimately done to capitalize on the power of memes to reinforce each other if a meme-complex is optimally constructed. Consequently I was struck by the concreteness of this example of warfare by means of the injection of a pre-existing, highly contagious, highly evolved meme-complex as a destructive contagion.
10:09:29 AM