    11

    und

    er Washington's rule, schooling the island's children in American

    ideals, American memes.  The Soviets seized Poland, Czechoslovakia

    and East Germany.  The commissars put the workers of these newly

    "liberated" states through political indoctrination sessions every day

    when work was over.  They jailed those who disagreed with the new

    official dogmas.19  Eventually the Soviet invaders shaped dependent

    nations whose leaders turned to Moscow for all major opinions, and

    whose goods streamed into the Soviet economy like blood cells flowing

    from the hand to the heart.  The Russians had fed entire new

    populations to their meme.  And the meme, in turn, had given the

    Russians a reward--a dramatic increase of prestige and power.

    At the center of each society is an imperious master--the meme.

    The gunboats of 19th century America, the tanks of the Soviet Union,

    and the armies of Islam were merely the arms through which a meme

    reached out to grab fresh matter.  They were the hands with which the

    meme reshaped raw substance in its own peculiar way.

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