Listen To The Dissidents, The Apostates, The Defectors From The Army Of Islam

Earlier today a comment was posted that consisted of some lines from Mayakovsky. That jogged my memory; I remembered that when Mayakovsky died, and all kinds of left-wing French writers and others were praising him to the skies, Russian emigres in Europe signed a collective letter informing those French people that, not being Russian, they were insufficient in their understanding, and proper appreciation, of Russian verse and, furthermore, that they failed to understand the nature of Bolshevism and of Mayakovsky’s role as a sweet singer of tall tales about the wonderfulness of the Revolution and its violence. Their letter went like this: 

“[…] nous, les écrivains russes, mieux informés que les étrangers de la situation actuelle de notre littérature,
nous affirmons que Maiakovsky n’a jamais été un grand poète russe, mais uniquement un compositeur de vers attaché au parti communiste et au gouvernement de l’U.R.S.S.” “Autour de Maiakovsky,” Les Nouvelles
littéraires (Paris, July 12, 1930).

We, the writers of Russia, better informed than foreigners about the present state of our litterature, insist that Mayakovsky was never a great Russian poet, but solely a poetaster attached to the Communist Pary and government of the U.S.S.R.

And this brings me to my point: the other day 21 Iranians, held in prison in Iran, appealed to the world, and to the Obama Administration, not to put their trust in the kind of people, and regiime, now in power in the Islamic Republic of Iran. They knew, because they were “better informed than foreigners about the present state” of their own country, what Iran was like, what it was up to, what it could be counted on to try to do.

The same goes for Islam. The C.I.A. used to eagerly await the debriefing of defectors from the Soviet Union and the satellite states of Eastern Europe. These people were always the best source of information bout what was really going  in those countries. It was from them that an understanding of Soviet propaganda in the West, came. It was the defectors who staffed Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, who broadcast the kinds of things that they knew would inform their audiences and, at the same time, help in keeping dissidenced going, in demoralizing and frightening the Soviet state. 

Where are those Defectors now? They exist. We’ve seen them on Youtube. Some have bought their books. Some have met them, or even know them well. But how limited are their audiences. The American government could put out, could subsidize the translation into a dozen languages, including Arabic, Farsi, Urdu, and Bahasa, books by Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, and others. Why don’t they? Why does no one in the CIA or FBI or State Department, or in the major newspapers, raise this issue? Where is the propaganda, or rather where are those who are “better informed” than all the rest of us about how Islam retains or even strengthens its hold on the minds of its adherents, and on the minds of others, too, the weak-minded in the West who find in Islam the Simple Solution of the Universe for which they have been longing.

What would it take to interest members of Congress in this matter, to get them to start talking about it, asking what is being done? The answer that can be expected — something along the lines of “Oh, we can’t do that, we can’t be anti-Islam” just won’t wash. There are a thousand ways to support this effort, while still allowing it not to be openly associated with an official effort. This was done in the case of editions of emigre writers in Russian, for which phantom publishing houses were created. It could be done now, to engage in a propaganda war to unsettle the certainties of tens of millions of Muslims, and in so doing, to demoralize some, and to make them, or others, leave Islam, even if not openly, and work with the advanced non-Muslim West, even if not openly. How much continued negligence, and ignorance, and refusal to mount a campaign that mirror-images the Jihad of “pen, speech” must we endure?