In my "America, Let's (Rock N') Roll! article of April 27th, Steven Den Beste of USS Clueless clued us all in to a new initiative called "Radio Sawa." It mixes American rock n' roll with local Arab artists, plus a news department that doesn't preach the killing of Jews and Americans. See that post, and Steven's link, for details.

Now my blogger friend Ideofact chimes in with an uplifting blog that suggests the change is already afoot, thanks to our private sector. This is an important point, and many people miss it when they see the War on Islamofascism as a government initiative. The power of a free press to find interesting nuggets and bring them to public (and even official) attention is huge. How many spies would we have to hire to achieve the same effect? On the cultural front, MTV, Disney, et. al. are each worth a division or two.

Want proof? I especially liked this quote from an Arab News article:

"It seems, sadly enough, that the destruction suffered by the values and concepts of our youths was greater than we imagined and the effect of MTV was more damaging than we suspected. And now we face a real challenge: To save ourselves from our children who have become our enemies."

Yessssss!!!

Ideofact sees the long-term effects as minimal, noting that Twisted Sister didn't warp our youth that much in the 80s. With respect, he misses the point.

Steven Den Beste's Sunday blog took a different view:

"Our greatest weapons in this war are blue-jeans and rock-and-roll. This war will not be won with guns and bombs, because the real battlefield is the minds of Arab youth. We will rock you!"

And the core of your culture will shatter, the new walls of Jericho will fall; not from the blare of trumpets and the beating of drums, but the sound of amplified electric guitars."

Hey, Steven, don't forget Barbie!

There's always the danger of re-fighting the last war, and of blindly saying "it worked in the Cold War" even though the underlying cultures differ in important ways. That said, here's why I still think Steven is right.

C.P. Freund of Reason magazine had an excellent article called "In Praise of Vulgarity," all about the allure of Western commercial culture. "Culture is built around meaning," he wrote, "and meaning proceeds from one’s self." That self-definition is given ample space in a culture like ours. It's a mortal threat to cultures like the Soviet Union and Islamofascist countries. The whole point of a totalitarian religion like Communism or the "Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue..." in Islamofascist regimes is that self-definition is not created, it is imposed as part of a fixed and unquestionable set of beliefs. MTV, Jazz, et. al. do much more than just provide compelling alternatives; they send the meta-message that alternatives exist, and that the process of freely-chosen attachment to them is part of one's self-definition.

The Soviets, correctly, saw that as a strike against the very foundations of their society. So did the Taliban. So do Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi sect, Khameni's pseudo-Shi'ite dictatorship in Iran, and other exponents of Islamofascism.

As Neal Stephenson presciently noted in his famous essay:

Orlando used to have a military installation called McCoy Air Force Base, with long runways from which B-52s could take off and reach Cuba, or just about anywhere else, with loads of nukes. But now McCoy has been scrapped and repurposed. It has been absorbed into Orlando's civilian airport. The long runways are being used to land 747-loads of tourists from Brazil, Italy, Russia and Japan, so that they can come to Disney World and steep in our media for a while. To traditional cultures, especially word-based ones such as Islam, this is infinitely more threatening than the B-52s ever were.

I suspect that it may be hard for our enemies to grasp Stephenson's concepts fully. As a service to them, therefore, let me put it in a vernacular they can understand:

"O, our enemies... you thought you had faced our true might, because your minds drown in the mire of violence, hate, and self-pity. And so you believe that a culture who values life over death is weak before the forces of organized hate and destruction. As we steadily cut your children off from the darkness with walls of music and light, you will come to understand the depth of your presumption. You will find, as we are rediscovering, that our spirit is strong enough to do whatever we truly require of it.

We are coming with our weapons. We are coming on waves of light. We are coming through our song, in all of its forms. We are not nearly finished.

But you might be."