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Mon 8 Jul 2002 16:03
by Kevin McGehee
in Coweta County, GA
[War]
[blogoSFERICS]
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NZ Bear says our War Against Terrorism is the first-ever state-declared war against a meme.
But I'm not sure I buy the idea this is the first-ever meme war. The American Revolution was a meme war too, as were the Second World War and the Cold War. So were the religion-based civil wars in Britain's tumultuous history, and of course the Crusades, the original jihad of Mohammed, and the Old Testament wars of the Israelites. In fact, any religious or ideological conflict is a meme war -- the one thing that distinguishes the present one is that we've heard of memes and can categorize the conflict accordingly; in the old days we would simply have said "ideology".
So I'm not sure Bear is really onto all that big of a new idea here. But he's done a great job of framing it in language that befits our 21st-century sensibilities.
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