At the turn of the century a new form of media rose that virtually obsoleted the dominant media form which had a stranglehold over information for the past 100 years. News print, television and film have all suffered with the rise of the internet, and rightly so, as their deadly machines have been increasingly co-opted to serve a corrupted establishment, and their subversive and destructive agenda.
The internet has provided the world, particularly the Western world, with a new form of protest – the meme. Originally conceived by Richard Dawkins in his seminal work ‘The Selfish Gene’, a meme is the cultural equivalent of a gene (its similarity in name is no coincidence). Whereas genes are information passed down genetically from generation to generation, memes are information passed down through cultural means. The old joke “an Englishman, in Irishman and a Scotsman..” is a meme in that the same joke will be told in Iran as “an Iranian, an Iraqi and an Israeli…”. the framework which exists underneath the outer dressing is the meme.
As the internet has grown certain figures, images or icons have been used again and again to express a similar idea, universally understood by users. One such meme is Pepe the frog, who recently rose to prominence with the Donald Trump campaign. Many Trump supporters took control of the Pepe meme, which has existed on the internet for at least a decade, and used it as a form of protest against their enemies, to great effect.
In the 21st century protests, marches and their inevitable outcome, the riot, are now the reserve of angry, impulsive minority groups, which gives them the unconscious appearance in the European psyche of being course, rash, or crude forms of political or social expression. The meme has become a vastly superior sophisticated form of protest or psychological warfare to Europeans. The blatant lack of ability to understand and use memes by minority groups is painfully obvious.
There are many in the European struggle who puzzle at the apparent apathy of their people to enact a response to the current situation, and it may seem that this lack of interest amounts to their certain death, at the hands of more energetic groups. Europeans have been through everything at least twice, their racial memory – always picking up subtle cues from the environment – is well aware of the amount of energy one expends when organising protests and marches and the such, and the relative futility of them in the face of the enemy. Europeans have become more nuanced in their behaviour and less physically obvious in their response to situations in which they are threatened. Once they had crusades and decades long wars, then revolutions, civil wars, pogroms, and short, large-scale ground offensives – each time becoming faster and more precise in the execution of the solution to the problem at hand. Europeans have faced their enemy many times before, and to respond the same way each time would be madness.
Europeans play politics like chess, reserve ones energy for the time when it will be most needed, and then, in as few decisive moves as possible, change the game. There is no longer any sense in bursts of energy, as these deplete vital stores and leave one unable to fully push back when needed. Instead, they suffer the spears and arrows, the constant insults and disrespect, the denigration and dismissal of their culture and the destruction of their civilisation, because they know deep down inside when the time is right they will strike back, and it will be devastating.