Many New York City residents might find it of interest that this Spring, even as the Trump campaign blitzkrieged towards the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, their fellow New Yorker Donald J. Trump met the very author and military theorist who probably gave Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda the strategic inspiration to send a pair of Boeing 767 commercial passenger jet airplanes crashing into the two tallest skyscrapers of the Big Apple.
It’s been on public display since at least 2004 when, in an article published in the September/October 2004 issue of Military Review, the author — a somewhat prominent paleoconservative Washington D.C. think-tanker, author, and military strategy theorist — referenced “an article I co-authored for the Marine Corps Gazette in 1989: “The Changing Face of War: Into the Fourth Generation”. The author then noted, parenthetically, that,
“(Our troops reportedly found copies of the article in the caves at Tora Bora, the al-Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan.)”
That author was William S. Lind. Here’s his 1989 article.
William Lind can also reasonably claim credit (details later in this story) for inspiring another major act of terrorism, the 2011 neo-Nazi terrorist attacks of Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik that killed 77 and injured at least 319, mostly teenagers.
At their meeting, Lind gave Trump a 2009 book he’d co-authored with the late Paul Weyrich, The Next Conservatism, which lays out policy prescriptions that are extremely similar to those which Donald Trump ran on so successfully in the 2016 GOP primaries.
Concerning his meeting with Trump, William Lind wrote,
“At the beginning of this column you will find a photograph of me giving a copy of The Next Conservatism to presidential candidate Donald Trump. Trump’s views on avoidable foreign wars, free trade, political correctness and a number of other subjects have much in common with The Next Conservatism. If he reads it, our book might be helpful to him in fleshing out his agenda.”
The Next Conservatism also has several pages laying out Lind’s theory of Fourth Generation Warfare.
There’s more evidence than just Lind’s parenthetical comment (details a few paragraphs below) that his 4GW theory inspired the grand strategy behind al-Qaeda’s devastating September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that leveled the World Trade Center, severely damaged the Pentagon, and killed over 3,000 people.
But it’s hardly William S. Lind’s fault, and he’s anything but a supporter of Islamic terrorism or radical Islam. In addition, Lind was an early, sharp critic of the U.S.invasion of Iraq and predicted, even before the invasion, that it would not end well.
Still, Lind did seem to take a perverse sort of professional pride in reports that his 4GW warfare ideas seem to have inspired al-Qaeda.
In Lind’s vision, Fourth Generation Warfare is a way for non-state actors, such as terrorist groups or insurgencies, to engage and even eventually defeat state powers.
4GW is form of asymmetric conflict that blurs civilian/combatant distinctions and uses a wide range of methods, from violence to PR and propaganda. The key aim, above all, is to contest the moral legitimacy of the state, so as to win loyalty of a target population.
Thus, one classic 4GW tactic is to try to goad the enemy state power into doing something stupid.
Al-Qeada’s September 11, 2001 attacks led to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, the longest war in America’s history, and the disastrous invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has in turn led to the rise of ISIS and the destabilization of neighboring Syria.
In his 2004 article in the September/October issue of Military Review, William S. Lind observed (see second paragraph) that during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 – in retaliation for al-Qaeda’s terrorist attacks, American troops reportedly found copies of his seminal 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article on Fourth Generation warfare “in the caves at Tora Bora, the al-Qaeda hideout in Afghanistan”.
A reported close aid to Osama bin-Laden even authored an article, for an al-Qaeda publication, that specifically referenced Lind’s article.
In his book The Sling and The Stone – On War In The 21st Century, authority on Fourth Generation Warfare U.S. Marine Corps Colonel Thomas X. Hammes concurred with Lind’s apparent suggestion – “al-Qaeda understands 4GW and is using it”, writes Hammes on page 204.
In his introduction to the first installment in his widely respected “On War” series of writings (“On War #1 – Can A Government Wage War Without Popular Support”, January 28, 2003), William Lind explicitly took credit for having inspired al-Qaeda’s 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, writing,
“Who am I? At present, I am a center director at the Free Congress Foundation. But in 1976 I began the debate over maneuver warfare that became a central part of the military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps finally adopted maneuver warfare as doctrine in the late `80s (I wrote most of their new tactics manual).
In 1989, I began the debate over Fourth Generation warfare—war waged by non-state entities—which is what paid us a visit on September 11, 2001. The article I co-authored then for the Marine Corps Gazette was formally cited last year by al Quaeda, who said, “This is our doctrine.” My Maneuver Warfare Handbook, published in 1985, is now used by military academies all over the world, and I lecture internationally on military strategy, doctrine and tactics.”
( note: Lind’s entire 241-part “On War” series is available in its entirety archived at the website of futurist and consultant to the Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff John Robb. For “On War # 1”, see this PDF file )
In his “On War #1”, written immediately before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Lind issued a prescient warning about the likely impact of a U.S. invasion of Iraq – the inspiration of more Islamic extremism:
“Most importantly, the real threat we face is the Fourth Generation, non-state players such as al Quaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. They can only benefit from an American war against Iraq—regardless of how it turns out. If we win, the state is further discredited in the Islamic world, and more young men give their allegiance to non-state forces.”
But Lind’s 4th Generation Warfare theory ideas are “neutral” in the sense that 4GW strategies can be implemented by actors holding pretty much any ideology, religion, or creed.
Another, more politically pointed, of Lind’s grand ideas has also helped inspire terrorism on a global scale. Not Islamic terrorism, but terrorism from the far right.
Since the mid-1990s William Lind has been the leading proponent of the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory that played a key role inspiring Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, who in 2011 carried out dual simultaneous terrorist attacks with an Oslo truck bomb and an automatic weapons attack on a teen summer camp.
Breivik’s attacks killed 77 and injured at least 319 people. His terrorism seem to have inspired a subsequent “copycat” terrorist attack carried out in Munich, that killed nine people, on July 27, 2016 — the fifth anniversary of Anders Breivik’s 2011 attacks.
Breivik’s political manifesto cited Lind’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory hundreds of times and plagiarized almost verbatim Lind’s 2004 Free Congress Foundation-published book “Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology” that laid out the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory, which posits a grand conspiracy, hatched by German-Jewish emigre intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany and resettled at Columbia University in New York City.
Other recent acts of terrorism seem to, as well, have ideological linkages to William Lind’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory. Below is the 22 minute video produced in the late 1990s under auspices of the Free Congress Foundation, which outlines the idea.
According to Lind’s conspiracy theory, “cultural Marxism” is Marxism translated from economic into cultural terms and the intent was (and is) to destroy America, Western culture, and Christianity.
Lind did not himself invent the conspiracy theory. It emerged in 1992 from a think tank associated with the far-right (but formerly Marxist) politician Lyndon LaRouche.
But with the help of Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation, William Lind has played the leading role in popularizing the “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory.
Lind’s been so successful that it is now given credence on the pages of the National Review, a magazine founded by conservative icon William F. Buckley as part of his crusade to marginalize extreme elements of the conservative movement and drive out the cranks, as represented at the time by the John Birch Society, from the Republican Party.
One of the earliest vectors for Lind’s conspiracy theory was the racist Council of Conservative Citizens, a recrudescence of the old civil rights-era white Citizen Councils formed in Southern U.S. states to fight desegregation.
The CofCC took a twenty minute video on the alleged origin of “cultural Marxism”, that William Lind had produced while working with the Free Congress Foundation, repackaged it, then distributed the video throughout the racist right.
Lind’s “cultural Marxism” conspiracy theory has spread so far geographically that it is now well entrenched among the European right, is being promoted in Brazil, and is even discussed among Russian political elites close to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Among his other books, William S. Lind is author of the 1985 Maneuver Warfare Handbook as part of a campaign, by Lind and other reformers, to modernize the fighting doctrine of the U.S. Armed Forces.
Lind is also author (under the pen name of “Thomas Hobbes”, but Lind has publicly admitted to writing the book) of the 2014 work of fiction “Victoria : A Novel Of Fourth Generation Warfare” (review of novel) that favorably details how, starting in 2016, former U.S. military members help launch a long-term insurgency in which predominantly white, Christian militia insurgents eventually topple the U.S. federal government and establish in its place smaller, ethnically segregated nation-states.
Lind’s militia insurgents carry out mass ethnic cleansing. Puerto Ricans are forced onto boats and shipped back to Puerto Rico. The insurgents force African-American families with children out of cities into forced sharecropping on white farmlands in the country. On page 464, one of Lind’s heroes describes,
“sources of disorder were given the option to repent or die. The biggest source of disorder had been the blacks...”
In order to quell a black nationalist uprising in Atlanta, Lind’s heroes vaporize the center of the city with a tactical nuclear weapon. A lone wolf pilot finishes off the remnants of federal leadership with a kamikaze suicide plan attack.
“Cultural Marxist” university professors at the center of the communist plot to promote American cultural degeneracy are lured to an event at Dartmouth and stabbed to death with Roman short swords while monks chant the Dies Irae during the massacre.
Towards the close of the novel, Lind’s protagonists launch a second crusade against the Islamic nations of the Earth.