From Leo Strauss to nowadays Neocons

[The Cat]

From Leo Strauss to nowadays Neocons.
We'll examine and discuss a brand new phenomenon in American politics: the Neo-conservatives (or Neocons)

1. The Neocons aren't true Republicans
First, Neocons are completely different than conservatives in that they want a strong powerful government headed by the executive branch; conservatives want the opposite. Conservatives are conned into supporting imperialism because these parasites took over conservative media a few decades ago. They have the influence, the money, and the power to crowd out true conservative voices. It took many years, actually decades of brainwashing to trick the people into thinking a strong government is conservative.

Quoting some Founding Fathers, so to establish the distinction:

George Washington:
"It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world. "

James Madison:
"Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations"

Thomas Jefferson:
"This country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar"

Abraham Lincoln:
“The money power preys upon the nation in times of peace and conspires against it in times of adversity. It is more despotic than monarchy, more insolent than autocracy, more selfish than bureaucracy. I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and cause me to tremble for the safety of my country. Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggravated in a few hands and the republic is destroyed.”

_________________________
Mayer Armschel Rothschild:
"Give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes the laws."

Carroll Quigley
"For the first time in its history, Western Civilization is in danger of being destroyed internally by a corrupt, criminal ruling cabal which is centered around the Rockefeller interests, which include elements from the Morgan, Brown, Rothschild, Du Pont, Harriman, Kuhn-Loeb, and other groupings as well. This junta took control of the political, financial, and cultural life of America...

We'll now give a voice to a real Republican, Ron Paul, talking about the Neocons' mentality:
Ron Paul Calls Out Neocons By Name (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFsA3bcpDXc
Star war a parody : Neocons vs Ron Paul (beware, 1h.43)
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 4190475658
The neocons reaction to Ron Paul
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig7/phillips3.html

For whatever reason – perhaps out of fear or power lust – neocons have abandoned conservative skepticism of government in favor of a blind ideology of American exceptionalism. Beck, Hannity, and Giuliani have jumped on Dr. Paul relentlessly because they are beginning to realize that many conservative voters are dissatisfied with the spendthrift, Wilsonian mainstream of the Republican Party. As the base shrinks and moderates start voting Democratic, they know and fear that true conservatives who believe in the ideals of the Old Right might wake up from their post-9/11 slumber and leave the neocons as well. In their attempt to hold their floundering movement together, they have resorted to shouting down and ostracizing the "crazed dope" Ron Paul, hoping to push him "way out" of the presidential race. Dr. Paul and his supporters must be doing something right to raise such fear and ire from the neocons; let us keep it up.

The Neocon's Fourth Reich understanding of national patriotism (everything must be in black or white):


Ron Paul speech, 10 july 2003 (excerpts)
http://www.house.gov/paul/congrec/congr ... 071003.htm

---The so-called conservative revolution of the past two decades has given us massive growth in government size, spending and regulations. Deficits are exploding and the national debt is now rising at greater than a half-trillion dollars per year. Taxes do not go down—even if we vote to lower them. They can’t, as long as spending is increased, since all spending must be paid for one way or another. Both Presidents Reagan and the elder George Bush raised taxes directly. With this administration, so far, direct taxes have been reduced—and they certainly should have been—but it means little if spending increases and deficits rise.

When taxes are not raised to accommodate higher spending, the bills must be paid by either borrowing or “printing” new money. This is one reason why we conveniently have a generous Federal Reserve chairman who is willing to accommodate the Congress. With borrowing and inflating, the “tax” is delayed and distributed in a way that makes it difficult for those paying the tax to identify it. Like future generations and those on fixed incomes who suffer from rising prices, and those who lose jobs they certainly feel the consequences of economic dislocation that this process causes. Government spending is always a “tax” burden on the American people and is never equally or fairly distributed. The poor and low-middle income workers always suffer the most from the deceitful tax of inflation and borrowing. (...)

Modern-day neo-conservatism was introduced to us in the 1960s. It entails both a detailed strategy as well as a philosophy of government. The ideas of Teddy Roosevelt, and certainly Woodrow Wilson, were quite similar to many of the views of present-day neocons. Neocon spokesman Max Boot brags that what he advocates is “hard Wilsonianism.” In many ways, there’s nothing “neo” about their views, and certainly nothing conservative. Yet they have been able to co-opt the conservative movement (...)

More recently, the modern-day neocons have come from the far left, a group historically identified as former Trotskyites. (...) Many neocons now in positions of influence in Washington can trace their status back to Professor Leo Strauss of the University of Chicago. One of Strauss’ books was Thoughts on Machiavelli. This book was not a condemnation of Machiavelli’s philosophy.

Paul Wolfowitz actually got his PhD under Strauss. Others closely associated with these views are Richard Perle, Eliot Abrams, Robert Kagan, and William Kristol. All are key players in designing our new strategy of preemptive war. Others include: Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute; former CIA Director James Woolsey; Bill Bennett of Book of Virtues fame; Frank Gaffney; Dick Cheney; and Donald Rumsfeld. There are just too many to mention who are philosophically or politically connected to the neocon philosophy (...)

Here is a brief summary of the general understanding of what neocons believe:
1. They agree with Trotsky on permanent revolution, violent as well as intellectual.
2. They are for redrawing the map of the Middle East and are willing to use force to do so.
3. They believe in preemptive war to achieve desired ends.
4. They accept the notion that the ends justify the means—that hardball politics is a moral necessity.
5. They express no opposition to the welfare state.
6. They are not bashful about an American empire; instead they strongly endorse it.
7. They believe lying is necessary for the state to survive.
8. They believe a powerful federal government is a benefit.
9. They believe pertinent facts about how a society should be run should be held by the elite (...)
10. They believe neutrality in foreign affairs is ill advised.
11. They hold Leo Strauss in high esteem.
12. They believe imperialism, if progressive in nature, is appropriate.
13. Using American might to force American ideals on others is acceptable. Force should not be limited to the defense of our country.
14. 9-11 resulted from the lack of foreign entanglements, not from too many.
15. They dislike and despise libertarians (therefore, the same applies to all strict constitutionalists.)
16. They endorse attacks on civil liberties, such as those found in the Patriot Act, as being necessary.
17. They unconditionally support Israel and have a close alliance with the Likud Party. (...)

There is now a recognized philosophic connection between modern-day neoconservatives and Irving Kristol, Leo Strauss, and Machiavelli. This is important in understanding that today’s policies and the subsequent problems will be with us for years to come if these policies are not reversed.

Not only did Leo Strauss write favorably of Machiavelli, Michael Ledeen, a current leader of the neoconservative movement, did the same in 1999 in his book with the title, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership, and subtitled: Why Machiavelli’s iron rules are as timely and important today as five centuries ago. (...) In Ledeen’s most recent publication, The War Against the Terror Masters, he reiterates his beliefs outlined in this 1999 Machaivelli book. He specifically praises: “Creative destruction…both within our own society and abroad…(foreigners) seeing America undo traditional societies may fear us, for they do not wish to be undone.” Amazingly, Ledeen concludes: “They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission.” If those words don’t scare you, nothing will. (...)

It’s of interest to note that some large Christian denominations have joined the neoconservatives in promoting preemptive war, while completely ignoring the Christian doctrine of a Just War. The neocons sought and openly welcomed their support. I’d like someone to glean anything from what the Founders said or placed in the Constitution that agrees with this now-professed doctrine of a “spectacular” state promoted by those who now have so much influence on our policies here at home and abroad. Ledeen argues that this religious element, this fear of God, is needed for discipline of those who may be hesitant to sacrifice their lives for the good of the “spectacular state.” (...)

Power, politics and privilege prevail over the rule of law, liberty, justice and peace. But it does not need to be that way. Neoconism has brought together many old ideas about how government should rule the people. It may have modernized its appeal and packaging, but authoritarian rule is authoritarian rule, regardless of the humanitarian overtones. A solution can only come after the current ideology driving our government policies is replaced with a more positive one. In a historical context, liberty is a modern idea and must once again regain the high moral ground for civilization to advance. Restating the old justifications for war, people control and a benevolent state will not suffice. It cannot eliminate the shortcomings that always occur when the state assumes authority over others and when the will of one nation is forced on another—whether or not it is done with good intentions. (...)

If the neoconservatives retain control of the conservative, limited-government movement in Washington, the ideas, once championed by conservatives, of limiting the size and scope of government will be a long-forgotten dream.

The believers in liberty ought not deceive themselves. Who should be satisfied? Certainly not conservatives, for there is no conservative movement left. How could liberals be satisfied? They are pleased with the centralization of education and medical programs in Washington and support many of the administration’s proposals. But none should be pleased with the steady attack on the civil liberties of all American citizens and the now-accepted consensus that preemptive war—for almost any reason—is an acceptable policy for dealing with all the conflicts and problems of the world. (...)

Spending, borrowing and printing money cannot be the road to prosperity. It hasn’t worked in Japan, and it isn’t working here either. As a matter of fact, it’s never worked anytime throughout history. A point is always reached where government planning, spending and inflation run out of steam. Instead of these old tools reviving an economy, as they do in the early stages of economic interventionism, they eventually become the problem. Both sides of the political spectrum must one day realize that limitless government intrusion in the economy, in our personal lives and in the affairs of other nations cannot serve the best interests of America.

This is not a conservative problem, nor is it a liberal problem—it’s a government intrusion problem that comes from both groups, albeit for different reasons. The problems emanate from both camps that champion different programs for different reasons. The solution will come when both groups realize that it’s not merely a single-party problem, or just a liberal or just a conservative problem. (...) Let it not be said that no one cared, that no one objected once it’s realized that our liberties and wealth are in jeopardy.

Jailed for a Ron Paul video (Alex Jones)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-kbk08qfqs
Alex Jones gets emotional on domestic terror
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCZkQUCh3OM

The freights of the Neocons are universalist organizations like the UN, and the universalist mind like that of Henry Kissinger. They abhor liberals from their own elitist despotism, which is their goal. The Neocons want America to kneel and blindly fight, much in Islamic ways...


It's another brand of National-Socialism, which they labeled Social Conservatism.
Neocons are political narcissists and won't hear -anything- but their own mindset.

Anne Norton defines the Neocons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dappb82loo
The lipstick off the Neocon pig
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kPphynFK6P4

Next: from Leo Strauss' ideology to senator Joe McCarthy's paranoiac patriotism...

[The Cat]

2. From Leo Strauss to Joe McCarthy: The paranoiac thinking machine. 1/2


Some Neocons Think-tankers:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kristol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Podhoretz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz

Hermann Goering:
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

The far-right diagram (click on 'view image' to see it) shows the Think-Tanks foundation of Bush's neocons: Leo Strauss, Irving & William
Kristol, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, Elliot Abrams, David Wurmser, Paul Wolfowitch, William Luti, Abram Shulsky, Lewis 'scooter' Libby,
Richard Perle, John Podhoretz (son of Norman Podhoretz) up to Donald Rumsfeld, etc. ect...

Leo Strauss: Perpetual war and noble lies, Shadia Drury interviewed by Danny Postel.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.inf ... le5010.htm

Perhaps no scholar has done as much to illuminate the Strauss phenomenon as Shadia Drury. For fifteen years she has been shining a heat lamp on the Straussians with such books as The Political Ideas of Leo Strauss (1988) and Leo Strauss and the American Right (1997). She is also the author of Alexandre Kojève: the Roots of Postmodern Politics (1994) and Terror and Civilization (forthcoming).

Shadia Drury: The idea that Strauss was a great defender of liberal democracy is laughable. I suppose that Strauss’s disciples consider it a noble lie. Yet many in the media have been gullible enough to believe it.

How could an admirer of Plato and Nietzsche be a liberal democrat? The ancient philosophers whom Strauss most cherished believed that the unwashed masses were not fit for either truth or liberty, and that giving them these sublime treasures would be like throwing pearls before swine. In contrast to modern political thinkers, the ancients denied that there is any natural right to liberty. Human beings are born neither free nor equal. The natural human condition, they held, is not one of freedom, but of subordination. (...)

Praising the wisdom of the ancients and condemning the folly of the moderns was the whole point of Strauss’s most famous book, Natural Right and History. (...) Strauss divided the history of political thought into two camps: the ancients (like Plato) are wise and wily, whereas the moderns (like Locke and other liberals) are vulgar and foolish. Now, it seems to me eminently fair and reasonable to attribute to Strauss the ideas he attributes to his beloved ancients. (...) Leo Strauss repeatedly defends the political realism of Thrasymachus and Machiavelli (see, p. 106). This view of the world is clearly manifest in the foreign policy of the current administration in the United States.

A second fundamental belief of Strauss’s ancients has to do with their insistence on the need for secrecy and the necessity of lies. In his book Persecution and the Art of Writing, Strauss outlines why secrecy is necessary. He argues that the wise must conceal their views for two reasons – to spare the people’s feelings and to protect the elite from possible reprisals.

The people will not be happy to learn that there is only one natural right – the right of the superior to rule over the inferior, the master over the slave, the husband over the wife, and the wise few over the vulgar many. In On Tyranny, Strauss refers to this natural right as the “tyrannical teaching” of his beloved ancients. It is tyrannical in the classic sense of rule above rule or in the absence of law. (...)

The effect of Strauss’s teaching is to convince his acolytes that they are the natural ruling elite and the persecuted few. And it does not take much intelligence for them to surmise that they are in a situation of great danger, especially in a world devoted to the modern ideas of equal rights and freedoms. Now more than ever, the wise few must proceed cautiously and with circumspection. So, they come to the conclusion that they have a moral justification to lie in order to avoid persecution. Strauss goes so far as to say that dissembling and deception – in effect, a culture of lies – is the peculiar justice of the wise. (...)

For Strauss, the rule of the wise is not about classic conservative values like order, stability, justice, or respect for authority. The rule of the wise is intended as an antidote to modernity. Modernity is the age in which the vulgar many have triumphed. It is the age in which they have come closest to having exactly what their hearts desire – wealth, pleasure, and endless entertainment. But in getting just what they desire, they have unwittingly been reduced to beasts.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more advanced than in America. And the global reach of American culture threatens to trivialise life and turn it into entertainment. This was as terrifying a specter for Strauss as it was for Alexandre Kojève and Carl Schmitt (the Nazi main Think-tanker). (...) The combination of religion and nationalism is the elixir that Strauss advocates as the way to turn natural, relaxed, hedonistic men into devout nationalists willing to fight and die for their God and country. (...)

Like Nietzsche, he believes that the history of western civilisation has led to the triumph of the inferior, the rabble – something they both lamented profoundly. (...) The issue of nationalism is an example of this. The philosophers, wanting to secure the nation against its external enemies as well as its internal decadence, sloth, pleasure, and consumption, encourage a strong patriotic fervour among the honour-loving gentlemen who wield the reins of power. That strong nationalistic spirit consists in the belief that their nation and its values are the best in the world, and that all other cultures and their values are inferior in comparison. (...)

If America fails to achieve her “national destiny”, and is mired in perpetual war, then all is well. Man’s humanity, defined in terms of struggle to the death, is rescued from extinction. But men like Heidegger, Schmitt, Kojève, and Strauss expect the worst. They expect that the universal spread of the spirit of commerce would soften manners and emasculate man. To my mind, this fascistic glorification of death and violence springs from a profound inability to celebrate life, joy, and the sheer thrill of existence.

To be clear, Strauss was not as hostile to democracy as he was to liberalism. This is because he recognizes that the vulgar masses have numbers on their side, and the sheer power of numbers cannot be completely ignored. Whatever can be done to bring the masses along is legitimate. If you can use democracy to turn the masses against their own liberty, this is a great triumph. It is the sort of tactic that neo-conservatives use consistently, and in some cases very successfully.

Neoconservativism 101: Politics of the Wolf.
http://blogcritics.org/archives/2005/08/29/071022.php

Nothing bothers these people more than the truth. It drives them up the friggin' wall. They will smear anybody who speaks the truth. There is a reason for this, and it comes from the very foundation of the Neoconservative belief system. The Neoconservatism movement is built upon the notion that it's better to get people to believe in "noble lies" than have them unsettled by the truth. (...)

You see, neoconservatism is a political school of thought that suffers from an elevated ego. The proponents of the theory believe they know "what's good for the rest of us". These people believe that the American people are better off ignorant and blind, than with actual freewill. In their view, freewill can lead to nihilism. And to them, nihilism will lead to the end of civilization. (...)

In the view of the Neocons, people are no different than a pack of wolves.(...) Through dominance, submission, and aggression, each dog will find it's place, and the pack will be happy. The Neocons believe that people need a hierarchy of order-- people need to be given commands that are easy to understand (...). Freewill is bad for the pack. Uncertainty is bad for the pack. Questioning the alpha-male puts the balance of the pack in danger. If the leader of the pack wants you to roll over, do it. Don't ask questions, just do it. Good dog! (...)

You see, neoconservatism does not give Man much credit (or compassion). It is anti-humanist. It is sheer wolf. It believes ignorance is better than knowledge. It values power more than love. It fears science, knowledge and enlightenment. It fears foreign packs. But most of all, it fears its true nature as a human being. And thus, it fears truth.

Mythologically speaking, Neoconservatism plays only to Man's masculine attributes (power, violence, discipline, order, etc.) without care for it's feminine attributes (love, compassion, chaos, etc. (...) As such, neoconservatism is completely out of balance. It fails to recognize half of our given human nature. It is out of touch with the moon-- the mother. It exhalts the sun-- the father. It disregards compassion, and knows not how to forgive. It thrives on competition and cannot handle cooperation. Neoconservatism is a philosophy of self-destruction.

In short: Neocons fear nihilism to the point of propounding a self-destructive philosophy, which cannot handle cooperation!

[The Cat]

2. From Leo Strauss to Joe McCarthy: The paranoiac thinking machine. 2/2

Leo Strauss, Fascist Godfather of the Neo-Cons, by Jeffrey Steinberg.
http://www.lookingglassnews.org/viewcom ... toryid=110

In a June 17, 1996 article by Richard Lacayo, Time magazine named the late University of Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973) as one of the most influential and powerful figures in Washington, D.C.—the man most responsible for the Newt Gingrich "Conservative Revolution" on Capitol Hill, and the intellectual godfather of Newtzi's "Contract on America" blueprint for vicious fascist austerity.

If Strauss' influence on politics in the capital of the most powerful nation on Earth was awesome in 1996, it is even more so today. The leading "Straussian" in the Bush Administration is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, who was trained by Strauss' alter-ego and fellow University of Chicago professor Allan Bloom. Wolfowitz leads the "war party" within the civilian bureaucracy at the Pentagon, and his own protégé, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, is Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff and chief national security aide, directing a super-hawkish "shadow national security council" out of the Old Executive Office Building, adjacent to the White House. According to Bloom biographer Saul Bellow, the day that President George H.W. Bush rejected Wolfowitz and Cheney's demand that U.S. troops continue on to Baghdad, during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Wolfowitz called Bloom on his private phone line to bitterly complain. It seems that "Bush 41" was not enough of a Nietzschean "superman" for Wolfowitz's taste. (...)

A review of Leo Strauss' career reveals why the label "Straussian" carries some very filthy implications. Although nominally a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany (he actually left for a better position abroad, on the warm recommendation of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt), Strauss was an unabashed proponent of the three most notorious shapers of the Nazi philosophy: Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. Recent biographies have revealed the depth of Heidegger's enthusiasm for Hitler and Nazism, while he served as the Chancellor of Freiburg University, throughout the epoch of National Socialism, and was the leader of a Nietzschean revival. Carl Schmitt, the leading Nazi philosopher of law, was personally responsible, in 1934, for arranging a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for Strauss, which enabled him to leave Germany, to study in England and France, before coming to the United States to teach at the New School for Social Research, and then, the University of Chicago. Strauss, in his long academic career, never abandoned his fealty to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Schmitt.

The hallmark of Strauss' approach to philosophy was his hatred of the modern world, his belief in a totalitarian system, run by "philosophers," who rejected all universal principles of natural law, but saw their mission as absolute rulers, who lied and deceived a foolish "populist" mass, and used both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that kept the general population in clueless servitude. For Strauss and all of his protégés (Strauss personally had 100 Ph.D. students, and the "Straussians" now dominate most university political science and philosophy departments), the greatest object of hatred was the United States itself, which they viewed as nothing better than a weak, pathetic replay of "liberal democratic" Weimar Germany.

Among the current lot of neo-cons, Michael Ledeen stands out as the one person who openly flaunts his "universal fascism." For Wolfowitz, Kristol, and the rest, their association with Strauss could be a large contributing factor in their looming downfall—and none too soon.

Richard Heinberg, Power Down.

Neoconservatism is the intellectual offspring of Leo Strauss (1899-1973), a jewish scholar who fled Hitler's Germany and taught political science at the University of Chicago. According to Shadia Drury in 'Leo Strauss and the American Right' (Griffin, 1999), Strauss advocated an essentially Machiavellian approach to governance. He believed that:

--A leader must perpetually deceive those being ruled.

--Those who lead are accountable to no overarching system of morals, only to the right of the superior to rule the inferior.

--Religion is the force that binds society together, and is therefore the tool by which the ruler can manipulate the masses...

--Secularism in society is to be supressed, because it leads to critical thinking and dissent.

--A political system can be stable only if it is united against an external threat, and that if no real threat exists, one should be manufactured.

Among Strauss's students was Paul Wolfowitz. Second-generation students (whatever that means) include Newt Gingrich, Clarence Thomas, Irving Kristol, William Bennett, John Ashcroft, and Michael Ledeen. Ledeen, of the American Interprise Institute, who has a "deep and abiding" fascination with Machiavelli and has written a book about him is a policy advisor to Karl Rove.

It really started with Leo Strauss political ideology: secular society is the worst possible thing, because it leads to individualism,
liberalism and relativism, traits weakening a society's ability to cope with external threats. Against Franklin D. Roosevelt's New
Deal, against Communism and Liberalism, it began to take a Fascist form under Prescott S. Bush, the grandfather of George.

The Nazi connection of the Bush Family, through Prescott S. Bush
http://www.liberalslikechrist.org/about/Bushfamily.html
A timeline of events:
http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/timeline.html

On Youtube: John Buchanan, Bush Family Aided Hitler
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_K2F4-iaxo
Bush - Nazi Link Confirmed, by John Buchanan (+links)
http://www.georgewalkerbush.net/bush-na ... firmed.htm

In turns this led to McCarthyism, whom Conservatives themselves got rid of... Especially when he started to accuse
George Marshall (& his Plan) of communist collusion. The same kind of 'patriotic' paranoia was settled by Neocons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

Herb Block (original) cartoons, The Washington Post.
http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/swann/herblock/fire.html
In their zeal to stamp out all signs of subversion in the United States, professional
and amateur anti-communists threatened to suppress American liberties as well.

1951, in Freedom from fear, President Harry Truman spoke against "scaremongers and hatemongers" who he said
"are trying to create fear and suspicion among us by the use of slander, unproved accusations, and just plain lies."

Even with Senator Joseph McCarthy on the wane, the general hysteria continued in many forms by assorted super patriots.
In the summer of 1954, a branch of the American Legion denounced the Girl Scouts, calling the "one world" ideas advocated
in their publications "un-American." Richard Nixon had discovered the power of smear attacks in his early campaigns for the
House of Representatives and Senate years before Senator McCarthy began to use them. In 1954, during his vice-presidential
campaign for re-election, Nixon traveled the country to charging previous Democratic administrations and current Democratic
members of Congress with being soft on communism. His targets included some of the most respected members of the Senate.

Herb Block's 1954 depiction of the emerging campaigner would stick with Nixon throughout his career.


Archtung: The Neo-conservatives aren't Republicans at all, but a narcissistic -socialism- known as Social Conservatism.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoconservatism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_conservatism

Many Christian democratic and Islamic parties around the world are socially conservative.

This is where the Neocons' kind of National Socialist agenda would lead America to... Beware now!

[The Cat]

How Straussian Horowitz would change the Constitution.



Horowitz, Chomsky, and the Neoconservative Ideology, by Kevin A. Carson.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/carson1.html

Neoconservatism's central defining characteristic is its repugnance to the genuine American conservative tradition. The views of Horowitz would not only be unrecognizable as conservatism to anyone born before 1914, but (with the possible exception of authoritarian centralists like Hamilton) would have been repudiated with disgust by the leading figures in the first two generations of American history. The American tradition from the revolutionary period to the present has been fixated on the dangers of power, and on the tendency of power to corrupt.

And it has been quite explicit on the kind of corruption it feared. Either the state apparatus would become an aristocracy in its own right, from the love of power and privilege, or it would function in the interests of an aristocracy of corporations and moneyed interests. Empire, to the revolutionary generation and the American mainstream up until 1941, was inconsistent with the survival of American constitutional traditions. Its concomitants, a large permanent military establishment and a powerful executive, were themselves great threats to liberty. (...)

They insist on referring to the Cold War as WWIII, and the "war on terrorism" as WWIV. They are the most strident advocates of turning the latter into a total war against the whole Islamic world. And nearly every day we see the necons, in the journals of opinion, defending the abrogation of still more of the Fourth Amendment by the USA Patriot Act, the suspension of habeas corpus for Jose Padilla, etc., as necessary sacrifices "for the duration" – which could be decades. They are enthusiastic on the potentials for global welfare of "benevolent empire," and they support presidential "national security" prerogatives reminiscent of a Stuart monarch. (...)

Straussians have a very odd interpretation, to say the least, of the U. S. Constitution. The nature of Straussian constitutionalism was made pretty clear in debates between the Straussian Harry Jaffa and the traditionalist M. E. Bradford. The proper way to interpret legal and historical documents (at least outside the Straussian priesthood) is in the context of the time they were written, according to the understanding of their contemporaries; in the case of the Constitution, this means according to the understanding of the ratifiers.

The method of the Straussians, however, is to take a handful of documents – the Declaration of Independence, the Preamble, the Gettysburg Address – as Sacred Texts. One interprets them by looking up "Common Defence and General Welfare" in Mortimer Adler's Syntopicon to see what Aristotle and Aquinas had to say on the subject, and then importing these ideas into the text of the Constitution itself. Straussians commonly assert that the values of the Declaration were somehow mystically incorporated in the Constitution, and are legally enforceable as such even when no warrant can be found on the face of the Constitution.

This Straussian methodology resurrects many of the idiosyncrasies of the "antislavery Constitutionalism" of the pre-Civil War period – or what I like to call "Shiite Constitutionalism." The idea of substantive due process comes from that cultural milieu. So does the Howard Phillips (U.S. Taxpayers' Party) dogma that the Fifth Amendment is not just a prohibition against the federal government, but actually empowers the President to enforce the rights of citizens against the states. And so does the idea that "Common Defense and General Welfare" in Article I Section 8, far from being a qualification of the fiscal power, is a general grant of power that renders the subsequent delegation of powers moot.

In the Straussian ideology, Liberty and Equality (always capitalized) are central values; but somehow the plain old right just to be left alone, or to control the things that affect your life, isn't. And these grand abstractions of Straussian/ Neoconservative "Liberty" and "Equality" somehow always seem to require a massive imperial commitment, with associated national security state, for their survival.

The old fashioned kind of (small l) liberty was obtained by old-fashioned, hell-raising American anti-authoritarianism – the kind that actually distrusted the benevolence of American power. In their willingness to augment the Leviathan state, and sacrifice real liberty on the altar of grand abstractions like "Liberty" and "Equality," the neoconservatives sound a lot like the left-wing statists Horowitz holds in such contempt.

Besides his ignorance of the genuine American conservative tradition, Horowitz is amazingly fuzzy in his conception of "the Left." First, he ignores the fact that conservatives and libertarians are historically on 'the Left' – in the sense that they would have sat with the Third Estate in the Estates-General or the Whigs in Parliament. Even the founding father of traditionalist conservatism, Edmund Burke, was a Whig who supported the Glorious Revolution and denounced the corruption (and decided non-benevolence) of British empire. If Mr. Horowitz had been alive then, he would probably have defended Warren Hastings against Burke's "unBritishism."

And second, he ignores the existence of a genuine anti-statist left. The Left has just as many nuances, complexities and subcurrents as the Right; but Horowitz's motivation is less a desire to understand things on their own terms, than to grab "whatever comes to hand in a fight." Horowitz delights in using the terms progressive, socialist and communist interchangeably. (...) Now I would suspect that Horowitz, as a former member of the Left himself, knows quite well that there are more varieties of anti-Leninist Marxism than there are of Leninism. (...)

He has the air of the deprogrammed Moonie who immediately constructs a new fanatical cult in opposition to Moonie-ism. (...) Neocons are not exactly situated to pose as champions of middle America against the elites. (...) The neocons, for all their pretensions of solidarity with the heartland, have shown a visceral hostility to the genuine American populist tradition.

From far-left extremism to far-right extremism

Horowitz calls for those in authority to be crushed
http://theprofessors.org/2006/03/attack ... se-in.html

Summary: On MSNBC's Scarborough Country, right-wing activist David Horowitz claimed that "[t]here are 50,000 professors" who are "anti-American" and "identify with the terrorists." There are just over 400,000 tenured and tenure-track full-time university professors in the United States. If Horowitz's numbers are accurate, that means approximately one out of every eight tenured or tenure-track college and university professors is a terrorist sympathizer.

Sounds like David Horowitz would bring America back to McCarthyism, in a very socialist kind of purge: Think right or be goulaged!

See a post of mine on David Horowitz, whom is the main editor behind internet's FrontPage Magazine.
viewtopic.php?p=19215#p19215

This concept of politics as warfare is intimately connected to Horowitz's personal political roots. In the 1960s, he was a militant Marxist and editor of Ramparts, one of the most radical leftist magazines in the United States. He also lent his vocal support to the Black Panther Party, which advocated and practiced armed "self-defense" against what it viewed as the "foreign occupying force" of racist white police. (...)

Of course, Horowitz is not the only disillusioned leftist from the sixties. What makes him significant is that his militancy has remained constant, even as his worldview has changed. In a strange way, he remains a Leninist, right down to his appearance (balding, with a Lenin-like goatee). He even continues to offer Lenin's words as advice. "You cannot cripple an opponent by outwitting him in a political debate," he explains in The Art of Political War. "You can do it only by following Lenin's injunction: 'In political conflicts, the goal is not to refute your opponent's argument, but to wipe him from the face of the earth.'"

[The Cat]

The Power of Nightmares, in 17 parts (1/2)
The Neocons: creating fantasy enemies all over and back again

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_Nightmares

The Power of Nightmares, subtitled The Rise of the Politics of Fear, is a BBC documentary film series, written and produced by Adam Curtis. Its three one-hour parts consist mostly of a montage of archive footage with Curtis's narration. (...)

The films compare the rise of the Neo-Conservative movement in the United States and the radical Islamist movement, making comparisons on their origins and claiming similarities between the two. More controversially, it argues that the threat of radical Islamism as a massive, sinister organised force of destruction, specifically in the form of al-Qaeda, is a myth perpetrated by politicians in many countries—and particularly American Neo-Conservatives—in an attempt to unite and inspire their people following the failure of earlier, more utopian ideologies.

A synopsis of the first 6 following videos

Part 1: "Baby It's Cold Outside"
The first part of the series explains the origin of Islamism and Neo-Conservatism. It shows Egyptian civil servant Sayyid Qutb, depicted as the founder of modern Islamist thought, visiting the U.S. to learn about the education system, but becoming disgusted with what he saw as a corruption of morals and virtues in western society through individualism. (...)

Qutb is executed in 1966, but he inspires the future mentor of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to start his own secret Islamist group. Inspired by the 1979 Iranian revolution, Zawahiri and his allies assassinate Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat, in 1981, in hopes of starting their own revolution. The revolution does not materialise, and Zawahiri comes to believe that the majority of Muslims have been corrupted by their western-inspired leaders and thus may be legitimate targets of violence if they do not join him.

At the same time in the United States, a group of disillusioned liberals, including Irving Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz, look to the political thinking of Leo Strauss after the perceived failure of President Johnson's "Great Society". They come to the conclusion that the emphasis on individual liberty was the undoing of the plan. They envisioned restructuring America by uniting the American people against a common evil, and set about creating a mythical enemy. These factions, the Neo-Conservatives, came to power under the Reagan administration, with their allies Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and work to unite the United States in fear of the Soviet Union. The Neo-Conservatives allege the Soviet Union is not following the terms of disarmament between the two countries, and, with the investigation of "Team B", they accumulate a case to prove this with dubious evidence and methods. President Reagan is convinced nonetheless.

On YouTube, 10 minutes each. A must see...

The Neocons ideology: A Mafia protection.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6O18HhmMamI
2. Creating serial myths of Good vs. Evil
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8RLOvVabpk
3. Leo Strauss and Co
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_C0wrqJ8BQ
4. Creating fantasy enemies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8qpL7prVms
5. Khomeiny & the corruption of freedom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujSt5-PeO4k
6. The Reagan years, the CIA team B.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGwYzbxufv0
7. Creating al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvYfKEm_7o4
8. Gorbachev warned the USA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgeYVZnPRHo
9. Creating the myth of al-Qaeda, Algeria, Egypt.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9ee1omBSLU

[The Cat]

The Power of Nightmares, in 17 parts (2/2)
The bottom message of the Neo-cuckoos is like that of Islamists: freedom is submission!

Adam Curtis originally intended to create a film about conflict within the conservative movement between the ideologies of Neo-Conservative "elitism" and more individualist libertarian factions. During his research into the conservative movement, however, Curtis first discovered what he saw as similarities in the origins of the Neo-Conservative and Islamist ideologies.

Synopsis of its part 2

Part 2: "The Phantom Victory"
In the second episode, Islamist factions, rapidly falling under the more radical influence of Zawahiri and his rich Saudi acolyte Osama bin Laden, join the Neo-Conservative-influenced Reagan Administration to combat the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. When the Soviets eventually pull out and when the Eastern Bloc begins to collapse in the late 1980s, both groups believe they are the primary architects of the "Evil Empire's" defeat. Curtis argues that the Soviets were on their last legs anyway, and were doomed to collapse without intervention.

However, the Islamists see it quite differently, and in their triumph believe that they had the power to create 'pure' Islamic states in Egypt and Algeria. However, attempts to create perpetual Islamic states are blocked by force. The Islamists then try to create revolutions in Egypt and Algeria by the use of terrorism to scare the people into rising up. However, the people are terrified by the violence and the Algerian government uses their fear as a way to maintain power.

In the end, the Islamists declare the entire populations of the countries as inherently contaminated by western values, and finally in Algeria turn on each other, each believing that other terrorist groups are not pure enough Muslims either.

In America, the Neo-Conservatives' aspirations to use the United States military power for further destruction of evil are thrown off track by the ascent of George HW Bush to the presidency, followed by the 1992 election of Bill Clinton leaving them out of power. The Neo-Conservatives, with their conservative Christian allies, attempt to demonise Clinton throughout his presidency with various real and fabricated stories of corruption and immorality. To their disappointment, however, the American people do not turn against Clinton.

The Islamist attempts at revolution end in massive bloodshed, leaving the Islamists without popular support.

10. Against liberals and liberalism: the religious far-right.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SU8sW_bDWU
11. Islamists in Algeria, Egypt. Destroying Bill Clinton.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ4Q_bhiCGo
12. The Neocons 'Noble Lies'.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGJc18Ip0s0
13. The phantom of al-Qaida & 9/11.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhMla-J8SUk
14. Fighting a phantom in Afghanistan
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjIf1YO2WYA
14. The Disney Enemy, all over again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woeLvfjqob8
15. Al-Qaeda is now everywhere, except in jails.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woeLvfjqob8
16. The media feeding the fantasy, Godzilla.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrJGqkn313A
17. Wars without evidence.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHdt05hN6Zw

Synopsis of its third (ending) part

Part 3: "The Shadows in the Cave"
The final episode addresses the actual rise of al-Qaeda. Curtis argues that, after their failed revolutions, bin Laden and Zawahiri had little or no popular support, let alone a serious complex organisation of terrorists, and were dependent upon independent operatives to carry out their new call for jihad. The film instead argues that in order to prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings, US prosecutors had to prove he was the head of a criminal organisation responsible for the bombings. They find a former associate of bin Laden, Jamal al-Fadl, and pay him to testify that bin Laden was the head of a massive terrorist organisation called "al-Qaeda".

With the September 11th attacks, Neo-Conservatives in the new Republican government of George W. Bush use this created concept of an organisation to justify another crusade against a new evil enemy, leading to the launch of the War on Terrorism.

The Neocons, YouTube quiery search, page one. Help yourself...
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_t ... ocons&aq=f

[The Cat]

The Neocons: Modern Mongols of Mind Terrorism

Leo Strauss' Philosophy of Deception, by Jim Lobe (2003).
http://www.alternet.org/story/15935

Rule One: Deception (-Islamic Taqqiya-)
Not only did Strauss have few qualms about using deception in politics, he saw it as a necessity. While professing deep respect for American democracy, Strauss believed that societies should be hierarchical – divided between an elite who should lead, and the masses who should follow. But unlike fellow elitists like Plato, he was less concerned with the moral character of these leaders. (...)

Second Principle: Power of Religion
Nazism, he believed, was a nihilistic reaction to the irreligious and liberal nature of the Weimar Republic. Among other neoconservatives, Irving Kristol has long argued for a much greater role for religion in the public sphere, even suggesting that the Founding Fathers of the American Republic made a major mistake by insisting on the separation of church and state. And why? Because Strauss viewed religion as absolutely essential in order to impose moral law on the masses who otherwise would be out of control.

At the same time, he stressed that religion was for the masses alone; the rulers need not be bound by it. Indeed, it would be absurd if they were, since the truths proclaimed by religion were "a pious fraud." "Secular society in their view is the worst possible thing,'' (Shadia) Drury says, because it leads to individualism, liberalism, and relativism, precisely those traits that may promote dissent that in turn could dangerously weaken society's ability to cope with external threats. Bailey argues that it is this firm belief in the political utility of religion as an "opiate of the masses" that helps explain why secular Jews like Kristol in 'Commentary' magazine and other neoconservative journals have allied themselves with the Christian Right and even taken on Darwin's theory of evolution.

Third Principle: Aggressive Nationalism
Like Thomas Hobbes, Strauss believed that the inherently aggressive nature of human beings could only be restrained by a powerful nationalistic state. "Because mankind is intrinsically wicked, he has to be governed," he once wrote. "Such governance can only be established, however, when men are united – and they can only be united against other people." (...)

"Perpetual war, not perpetual peace, is what Straussians believe in," says Drury. The idea easily translates into, in her words, an "aggressive, belligerent foreign policy," of the kind that has been advocated by neocon groups like PNAC and AEI scholars – not to mention Wolfowitz and other administration hawks who have called for a world order dominated by U.S. military power.

Strauss' neoconservative students see foreign policy as a means to fulfill a "national destiny" – as Irving Kristol defined it already in 1983 – that goes far beyond the narrow confines of a "myopic national security." (...) "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy," (Shadia) Drury says.

When debating with any of them, you'll see that industrial false analogies and ad hominems are Neocons' trademark,
much like the Islamic Tu Quoque. They will deluge you with them. They thrives on hatred and their mind is narrowed
like a clenched fist. From Strauss, they think that might makes right. They're mummified in paranoia: don't disturb!

Remember that, not only can't they handle cooperation, they despise any openness as a liberal weakening threat...
Neocons are allergic to reason and universality: to go ahead they keep on looking back, so to advance... backward.
In fact, they pretty much think like Islamic fundamentalists since... all forms of extremism end up looking so alike.


Just to figure out what their perfected world would be, think of Orson Welles' Big Brother, Double Think and Newspeak...

According to the novel, doublethink is:
“To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies — all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.”

Orwell explains that the Party could not protect its iron power without degrading its people with constant propaganda. Yet, knowledge of this brutal deception, even within the Inner Party itself, could lead to disgusted collapse of the State from within. For this reason, the government uses a complex system of reality control.

Newspeak is a fictional language in George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. In the novel, it is described as being "the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year". Orwell included an essay about it in the form of an appendix in which the basic principles of the language are explained (...) a greatly reduced and simplified vocabulary and grammar. This suits the totalitarian regime of the Party, whose aim is to make any alternative thinking — "thoughtcrime", or "crimethink" in the newest edition of Newspeak — impossible by removing any words or possible constructs which describe the ideas of freedom, rebellion and so on.

The bottom hyphen between all extremisms is that they think of people as convenient idiots and to-be-sacrificed cattle for The One Cause!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublethink
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four

[Bob]

This concept of politics as warfare is intimately connected to Horowitz's personal political roots. In the 1960s, he was a militant Marxist and editor of Ramparts, one of the most radical leftist magazines in the United States. He also lent his vocal support to the Black Panther Party, which advocated and practiced armed "self-defense" against what it viewed as the "foreign occupying force" of racist white police. (...)

Of course, Horowitz is not the only disillusioned leftist from the sixties. What makes him significant is that his militancy has remained constant, even as his worldview has changed. In a strange way, he remains a Leninist, right down to his appearance

The convert is often 'plus royaliste que le roi' and of course such people have not really progressed in any meaningful way as they have never abandoned the intellectual mould of their 'earlier' selves.

Reminds me of Ali Sina.

[The Cat]

The GOP's McCarthy gene


Neil Gabler's article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/com ... 9632.story

The line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon. (...)

For the polite conservatives, McCarthy was useful. That's because he wasn't only attacking alleged communists and the Democrats whom he accused of shielding them. He was also attacking the entire centrist American establishment, the Eastern intellectuals and the power class, many of whom were Republicans themselves, albeit moderate ones. When he began his investigation of the Army, he even set himself against his own Republican president, who had once commanded that service. In the end, he was censured in 1954, not for his recklessness about alleged communists but for his recklessness toward his fellow senators. Moderate Republicans, not Democrats, led the fight against him. His intemperance disgusted them as much as it emboldened his fans, Goldwater among them.

But if McCarthy had been vanquished -- he died three years later of cirrhosis from drinking -- McCarthyism was only just beginning. McCarthyism is usually considered a virulent form of Red-baiting and character assassination. But it is much more than that. As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his famous essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," McCarthyism is a way to build support by playing on the anxieties of Americans, actively convincing them of danger and conspiracy even where these don't exist. (...)

Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. (...) And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing.

The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.

Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/conspiracy ... style.html

Emulating the Enemy
The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point. Like religious millenialists he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date fort the apocalypse. (“Time is running out,” said Welch in 1951. “Evidence is piling up on many sides and from many sources that October 1952 is the fatal month when Stalin will attack.”) (...)

The enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman—sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history, or tries to deflect the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced. The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing) (...)

It is hard to resist the conclusion that this enemy is on many counts the projection of the self...

As we've seen, it was inspired by Herb Block's cartoon, made in 1951. Back to the same shame...

[The Cat]

Trotsky, Strauss, & the Neocons...
Nothing to do with traditional republicanism. Nothing...

James Madison:
In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate Constant apprehension of War,
has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not
long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at
home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe,
the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people.

Abraham Lincoln:
The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons.
Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people
was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.


War Party's leftist and elitist roots exposed, by Justin Raimondo.
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j061303.html

Libertarians are naturally horrified by the Straussian devotion to the benevolent dictatorship of a self-appointed elite, and we at antiwar.com have not spared Strauss and his followers their fair share of abuse. While Shadia B. Drury's 1999 book, Leo Strauss and the American Right, provided a critique of Strauss's influence from the left, paleoconservatives such as Paul Gottfried were among the first to raise the alarm. But I'll leave it to my old friend Burt Blumert to capture the essence of the antagonism that has long existed between the followers of Strauss and the Old Right gang centered around LewRockwell.com:

"Neocons, as ex-Trotskyites, are bad enough, but those who follow the pro-pagan Leo Strauss are deadly. He advocated the Big Lie. Forgive me for all the gory details, but these people – with their other leaders like Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol and the help of the CIA – perverted the American right into loving the welfare-warfare state." (...)

In the Orwellian world of the neocons, where a new form of political correctness frames their every utterance, the language is contracting. Because the goal of totalitarian thought control is to make the expression of political incorrectness impossible, the goal of this Neocon Newspeak is the abolition of many now-common words. In this context, words are used, not to make debating points, but to end all discussion. (...)

(Stephen) Schwartz raises a perfectly legitimate point: if the ex-Trotskyists have to apologize for importing their particular brand of militarism into the neocon movement, then why don't the ex-Stalinists have to "grovel," too? I say let them both apologize for supporting some variant of mass-murdering commie totalitarianism, or stop pretending to be "conservatives."

The ideas that energize the neoconservative movement have little if anything to do with traditional conservatism. That this suspicion is now widespread among traditional conservatives, as well as journalists, is not to be undone by lame accusations of alleged "anti-Semitism." Paring down the permitted language of political debate is not going to work, either. It is clear beyond the need for further proof that the War Party bamboozled the American public into taking that first fateful step on the road to empire. We know who they are, and what they believe: it is not a "conspiracy," as the detractors of this theory insist, because there is nothing secret about it – and because the same people are urging us onward, to Iran, Syria, and beyond.

The esoteric elitist Strauss, the Leninist elitist Trotsky, Schwartz and his mock-operatic "Third and a Half International" re-fighting the inter-Commie faction wars of the 1930s with a gaggle of ex-Stalinists – this is the official "conservative" movement of today! No wonder Commissar Frum and his fellow neocons felt compelled to attack us antiwar, limited government types as "unpatriotic conservatives," going so far as to declare that they "turn their backs" on us. They turned their backs on authentic conservatism some time ago

The Neocons' own Constitution: Straussian 'Noble Lies' safeguarding their fanatism.


Their want is to create chaos, inside out, so a Neocon dictatorship comes out to end Civil Rights & true Democracy.
In history, we have a similar scenario in the 1930s Weimar Germany, where Nazi ideologues bashed away liberalism...

Next: Neocons or Neo-Cockoos?

[The Cat]

Neocons, Neo-Nazicons or Neo-Cockoos?

Political Conservatism As Motivated Social Cognition

Now, this was a HUGE psychological research, funded by the US government itself. It has been conducted by four psychologists
who sought patterns among 88 samples, including 22,818 participants, taken from journal articles, books and conference papers.
The material originating from 12 countries included speeches and interviews given by politicians, opinions and verdicts rendered
by judges, as well as experimental, field and survey studies. It's a meta-analysis by all accounts, published in July 2003.

Now this study applies more accurately the further right from Conservatism we get and does not apply so well
if considering the 'moderate Republicans''. In the case of the Neo-Nazicons & Neo-cockoos, it's fully applying...


http://berkeley.edu/news/media/releases ... tics.shtml

Ten meta-analytic calculations performed on the material - which included various types of literature and approaches from different countries and groups - yielded consistent, common threads, Glaser said. The avoidance of uncertainty, for example, as well as the striving for certainty, are particularly tied to one key dimension of conservative thought - the resistance to change or hanging onto the status quo, (...) Concerns with fear and threat, likewise, can be linked to a second key dimension of conservatism - an endorsement of inequality (...)

Disparate conservatives share a resistance to change and acceptance of inequality... Hitler, Mussolini, and former President Ronald Reagan were individuals, but all were right-wing conservatives because they preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality in some form. Talk host Rush Limbaugh can be described the same way, the authors commented in a published reply to the article.

The researchers conceded cases of left-wing ideologues, such as Stalin, Khrushchev or Castro, who, once in power, steadfastly resisted change, allegedly in the name of egalitarianism. Yet, they noted that some of these figures might be considered politically conservative in the context of the systems that they defended. The researchers noted that Stalin, for example, was concerned about defending and preserving the existing Soviet system. Although they concluded that conservatives are less "integratively complex" than others are, Glaser said, "it doesn't mean that they're simple-minded." Conservatives don't feel the need to jump through complex, intellectual hoops in order to understand or justify some of their positions, he said. "They are more comfortable seeing and stating things in black and white...

http://zeppscommentaries.com/S&E/rightwing.htm

According to the authors:"[W]e consider evidence for and against the hypotheses that political conservatism is significantly associated with:

(1) mental rigidity and closed-mindedness, including
a) increased dogmatism and intolerance of ambiguity,
b) decreased cognitive complexity,
c) decreased openness to experience,
d) uncertainty avoidance,
e) personal needs for order and structure, and
f) need for cognitive closure;

(2) lowered self-esteem;
(3) fear, anger, and aggression;
(4) pessimism, disgust, and contempt;
(5) loss prevention;
(6) fear of death;
(7) threat arising from social and economic deprivation; and
(8) threat to the stability of the social system.

We have argued that these motives are in fact related to one another psychologically,
and our motivated social—cognitive perspective helps to integrate them.
We now offer an integrative, meta-analytic review of research on epistemic,
existential, and ideological bases of conservatism."

Says Bryan Zepp Jamieson, author of the above thread:
''What the researchers were looking at were the group that I’ve been referring to for years as "secular fundamentalists."
The political variant of these critters tends to be reactionary, paranoid, authoritarian, intolerant, contemptuous of rules
that don’t suit them and overbearing in their observance on behalf of others of rules that do suit them. While there are
left wing examples (David Horowitz was a good example in his time) they generally gravitate toward fascism and call it
conservatism, even though it’s usually better described as radical reactionaryism. (...)

The authors address what they call the "conservative paradox" of radical reactionaryism (e.g, Hitler, Mussolini or Pinochet)
by pointing out that their calls for extreme inequality in the social order were juxtaposed with promises to lead the country
back to an ideal past, one in which "traditional values and morality" prevailed. It occurs to me a good catchphrase for the
mawkish and hollow babble that usually accompanies this fraud is "morning in America." Our present-day radical reactionaries
continuously harken back to a traditional America that never existed, one where everyone was a god fearing generic protestant,
people with accents lived in the poor part of town and never bothered folks, and women and blacks knew their place.''


http://www.awitness.org/journal/politic ... mmary.html

Intolerance of Ambiguity
Intolerance of doubt or ambiguity is another measured trait that has been found to strongly correlate with subsequent predictions
of conservative thought and behavior. Dislike of uncertainty leads to dichotomous thinking styles (good and evil, black and white
types of stereotyping (...0, and intolerance for any idea that there is no absolutes in terms of dealing with social issues). (...)

The consequences of this tendency towards intolerance lead to dogmatically sticking with a single solution, disregarding all
contrary evidence that might introduce ambiguity, or any of those troubling shades of grey, and a tendency to think in terms
of ‘good and evil' (much as people are sorted into rigid categories such as ‘saved and unsaved' (...) by the religious right),
and a tendency to jump to conclusions before sufficient evidence has been accumulated and then rigidly stick with a half
thought out solution through thick and thin, while remaining closed to new experience or ideas.

The researchers describe the consequences of such rigidity in thinking as,
Resistance to reversal of apparent fluctuating stimuli, the early selectionand maintenance of one solution in a perceptually
ambiguous situation, inability to allow for the possibility of good and bad traits in the same person, acceptance of attitude
statements representing a rigid, black-white view of life, seeking for certainty, a rigid dichotomizing into fixed categories,
premature closure, and remaining closed to familiar characteristics of stimuli.

Mental Rigidity, Dogmatism, and Closed-Mindedness.
Dogmatism has also been found to correlate strongly with conservatism (...) Such stubbornness can lead to an artificial
sense of completeness, of knowing, of certainty, and cognitive closure, but only that price of developing an intolerant
and dogmatic mind set that can somehow hold inconsistent ideas in some kind of tension in the same mind. (...)

Fear then leads to dogmatism, as the attempt to achieve cognitive closure leads to a desperate search for any ‘firm belief'
that can bring certainty and safety in the midst of a confusing world. (...) The consequence of this need for closure, even
in ambiguous situations that do not lend themselves to simplistic black and white stereotyping, is dogmatism, and dogmatism
in its turn leads to bigotry, an unchanging world view, a tendency to jump to a conclusion and then stick with it (primacy
effects in impression formation), to use past stereotypes to label new situations (correspondence in attitude attribution),
and to stubbornly resist new evidence and reject anyone with a different opinion.

Conclusion:
One of the reasons why right wing extremism has been so heavily studied is the fact that this century has been convulsed
so violently by right wing extremism, notable examples being Hitler and Mussolini, and the kind of national extremism that
resulted in such bloody conflicts as World War One. These great disasters led to great interest in studying conservatism
and the right wing in general since there is an obvious correlation manifestations of conservatism and the potentiality for
just this kind of destructive right wing extremism that was one of the tragedies of the previous century...While angered
Republicans in Congress might raise a hue and cry about ‘bias' and ‘unfair criticism of conservatism and the right wing' it is a
fact that right wing extremism was one of the most damaging movements of the last century, not just in loss of life (Nazism,
and third world right wing despotism) but also in ruin of lives (McCarthyism) and it is for this reason that so much attention
has been focused on studying and understanding right wing tendencies (not just simply a desire to express a bias).

We thus see in the case of fascism that ideological content and structure support each other.
There is no incompatibility between them and thus psychological conflict is not engendered or
guilt feelings aroused. For this reason, authoritarian ideological structures may be psychologically
more reconcilable—more easily "attachable"—to ideologies that are antidemocratic than to those
that are democratic in content. If a person's underlying motivations are served by forming a closed
belief system, then it is more than likely that his motivations can also be served by embracing an
ideology that is blatantly anti-equalitarian. If this is so, it would account for the somewhat greater
affinity we have observed between authoritarian belief structure and conservatism than between
the same belief structure and liberalism.

Extremely conservative and authoritarian attitudes may lead ... to an actively hostile or dominant approach to dealing
with socially sanctioned scapegoats and devalued out-groups (and) may lead to a more passively submissive or deferential
posture toward authorities, which would make its subscribers ideal candidates to follow the next Hitler or Mussolini.

Thus, extreme right-wing attitudes "lock" people into a "dominance submissive authoritarian embrace".

The psychologists who signed the research were:
John T. Jost, of Stanford University's Graduate School of Business;
Jack Glaser, of University of California, Berkeley;
Arie W. Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland at College Park;
Frank J. Sulloway, of University of California, Berkeley.

Next: A serial on if & when debating Neo-Cockoos...

[The Cat]

Neocons, Neo-Nazicons or Neo-Cockoos?

When debating with Neo-Cockoos & simpled-minded Neocons...


From the mentality described in the study, when debating with a Neocon, you'll be faced with...

--They aim to silence you, not dealing with an argument. If they succeed, they 'won'.

--They readily mistake virulence for reason. A garbage truck they'll dump on you at every chance.

--Feign indignation, regurgitating points ad nauseam. It's a debilitating showdown at OK Coral.

--Not a spark of integrity: blame everything on anything else than themselves like a machine-gun.

--Set-in-stone, winge, whine, gripe, can't get a grip on reality. They thrive on fantasy apocalyptic enemies.

--Cognitive dissonance closing down anything that defies their mindset.

--Ditto heads who look at Pumpkinheads as geenyus.

--Longing for a state of absolute where they do not have to think... and you're asking them to.

--Reproducing like automates the catechism of their think-tankers.

--Demonize the opponent through industrial ad hominems.

--Lynching mob mentality. You are guilty from the first for thinking any differently.

--Do not have any positive argument, only slanders and trashes like throwing out.

--They hardly can defend their own position, thus always savagely attacking.

--Never question their premises, indulge into double thinking (Straussian 'noble lies' -Taqqiya).

--Never questioning their own bias: they're right from might. No further evidence required.

--Compromising is the ultimate defeat. They'll argue to death their own trivialities.

--Totally without a clue on what's real: heads crammed up with hatred automatisms.

--Arguing like a street fight grabbing whatever comes to hands.

--They specialized in false analogies, of which they'll bombard you ruthlessly.

--They'll patronize violence and coercion over Human Rights. Lawyers are a hindrance by definition.

--Anything universal in spirit is evil and their notion of people is that of a cattle, or useful idiots.

--They will spew on your Political Correctness (etc) rather than admit their own.

--Narcissists with inflated ego, whom idolize their own web of fabrications.

--They won't listen to -anyone- but themselves and the dictums of their pack.

--Their minds have marinated in a barrel of hubris and apocalyptic freights.

--Character assassinations are splashed in a cartoonist, ludicrous, frenzy.

--Filth manufacture reciting propaganda like a rosary of superstitions.

--Neutrality is anathema, you're either with or against them. Grey zones make them foaming like a grizzly.

--They thrive on conspiracies, self-fabricated evidences of dreadful fantasy enemies .

--Paranoia is their unmistakable trait. Fear of fears is the only fear unknown to them.

--The only way to avoid being persecuted, so they feel, is to persecute you.

--Show them how Jesus was a dedicated liberal! They'll crucify you...


Examples of such:
viewtopic.php?p=24662#p24662
viewtopic.php?p=24664#p24664
viewtopic.php?p=24675#p24675
viewtopic.php?p=24816#p24816

[The Cat]

Neocons are likely Limbaumed in a Rush!

The Far-right Republican's new Head: Rush Limbaugh or debating with Neocon's Cult of Trash...


Why Neo-Cons Are Different From True Conservatives, by Rahelio Soleil.

http://www.thenewblackmagazine.com/view.aspx?index=140

Everyone of us, no matter how favourable natural selection has been to our family, has a relative that was arrested intellectually at some point, which basically made him a perfect convert for neocon media. At the drop of a hat they can recite a never ending stream of hollow cliches with the command and affect of a great right-wing giant. They have been Coulterized, Hannitized, O'Reillyfied, and Limbaumed. (...) There is a better chance they will make you dumber than you will make them smarter.

Anyone who has worked in an asylum knows that it is more likely that a crazy person will make you crazy than you will make them sane. (...) Neocons don't have ideas, they have memorized answers written by other people. (...) The thing that might annoy you most is that neocons know nothing about history. At very best their world starts in 1960, at worst it starts with Reagan's last term. This means you cannot discuss race, foreign policy, or social policy because their frame of reference will be too narrow for them to comprehend a broad argument. Again, don't get frustrated. Remember, retarded. (...)

As long as your statements can be quickly countered with something they heard on the Fox News Channel they are confident. This is why you should know Conservative ideas better than they do. A neocon is an expedient sort, they haven't the slightest idea what an actual Conservative believes in the classical sense. After years of language abuse and an opinion chanel passing for a news source, they don't know what a liberal is either. This is your advantage: Their respective media heroes are tabloid lightweights who have not rooted their ideas in Conservatism at all. They are "new" conservatives, much like new money, none of the class and all of the vulgur affect. The neocon heroes are not scholars, or even thinkers for that matter, they are drive-thru media peddlers serving a million McDummies daily.

Another important fact to keep in mind is that neocons are impregnably duo-chromatic. Everything in their world is black or white.

You are with us or against us. You're for the war or a treasonous liberal traitor. You're a black republican or one of those welfare niggers. Their house is built upon the fallacy of the excluded middle. The color gray does not exist, and the rest of reality's color palette is only mythical to them. (...) There is the awesome straw man, whereby the idiot argues against "turning over our foreign policy" to other countries when what you actually suggested was diplomacy. There is the ad hom, which is their favorite, they attack you personally rather than stick to the point in question. You say something like "I think we have to be careful about how we are perceived in the world" and they retort "you lefties really do hate America." (...)

Other devices include the false indignation, mock outrage, empty patriotism, school yard name-calling, be-littling of ideas they don't understand, discounting facts from sources they don't like, interrupting you when you're making too much sense, and avoiding debating ideas by labeling them as communist, socialist, clintonesque, liberal, Liberal, or LIBERAL. (...) They've been told their narcissistic prejudices are natural law and their pudgy minds are somehow linked to the greatest of America. It is not for you to ponder too much what retarded people believe, it is only necessary to understand they are retarded and prevent them from hurting themselves and others.

It isn't their fault, retardation is not a choice. You'll do well to pepper them with facts and remain unemotional about the outcome. You will not change their mind because it is closed for the winter. Justify nothing and never attempt to teach them. Their ignorance is stronger than your ability to help. Even Mother Theresa would couldn't help them, because, after all, she was liberal.

So, how do you know you've won? When they are completely frustrated, babbling babies who mock and ridicule everything you say because they've realized they cannot battle you with facts, truth, or reality. This is when they either ignore your reasoned statements, or attempt to have the upper hand by dismissing them all together. When they shift from being mildly snarky and whimsical to being outright hostile you've got them where you want them. You've reduced them to into senseless babblers going down in meaningless flames (...)

They like to preach to the choir, much like a cult, any defection from their well protected and erroneous reality is a threat to their social order. I've been removed from several neocon blogs and groups, not because I was disrespectful or rude (in fact, I weathered a great deal of vitriol). All it took was entering their echo chamber and inserting small pieces of reality. Neocons hate that. Thinking is hard. Damn lefties...

[The Cat]

Humanitarianism and moral rules aren’t always compatible.
Compassion vs Conscience (motherly empathy vs fatherly morals), by Holmes Rolston.

http://moralorigins.com/category/conser ... -liberals/

My Parents Made Me Feel It
We have all, or almost all, grown up with parents who did their best to make us feel good when we behaved “properly,” and especially feel bad when we did something wrong, and those feelings were generally reinforced by reward or punishment, at least in the form of their approval or disapproval. The result, and usually their intent, was to cause us to internalize their rules of behavior, so that we felt good when we followed them and bad when we violated them. It worked! Just like Pavlov’s dogs salivating in response to the feeding bell, we still feel good when we follow the rules, and bad when we don’t. We might have modified the rules slightly, but we can’t escape our conscience. Our parents might be miles away now, or dead, but they are still represented in our conscience. (...)

Liberal Compassion and the Conservative Conscience
So the liberal part of each of us, that part driven by compassion, is motivated to unselfish behavior by the pain (and sometimes the pleasure) of others, transplanted to us through empathy. The conservative part, that part driven by conscience, is motivated to unselfish behavior by the pain of guilt (and sometimes the pleasure of pride), which is an internalized memory or anticipation of punishments and rewards. The compassion of our liberal selves inspires us to humanitarian behavior. The conscience of our conservative selves inspires us to follow whatever moral rules we have internalized. Humanitarianism and moral rules aren’t always compatible.

The far-rightist Neocons always look for outside threats so to avoid any self-criticism (guilt).


Neocons and far-rightists have an authoritarian sense of what is 'moral', 'true' and 'patriotic'.

Another study confirms the huge -Political Conservatism As Motivated Social Cognition-.

We've just seen that far-right conservatism, its reluctance of changes, are often associated with paranoia.
Such a feeling, of being surrender by threats, becomes easily detrimental and can interfere with judgment.

Note: The anterior congulate cortex is the portion of brain enabling us to deal with change.


Study finds left-wing brain, right-wing brain, by Denise Gellene (2007).
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la- ... 2337.story

Scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information. (...) The results show "there are two cognitive styles -- a liberal style and a conservative style," said UCLA neurologist Dr. Marco Iacoboni, who was not connected to the latest research.

Participants were college students whose politics ranged from "very liberal" to "very conservative." They were instructed to tap a keyboard when an M appeared on a computer monitor and to refrain from tapping when they saw a W. M appeared four times more frequently than W, conditioning participants to press a key in knee-jerk fashion whenever they saw a letter.

Each participant was wired to an electroencephalograph that recorded activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, the part of the brain that detects conflicts between a habitual tendency (pressing a key) and a more appropriate response (not pressing the key). Liberals had more brain activity and made fewer mistakes than conservatives when they saw a W, researchers said. Liberals and conservatives were equally accurate in recognizing M.

Researchers got the same results when they repeated the experiment in reverse, asking another set of participants to tap when a W appeared. Frank J. Sulloway, a researcher at UC Berkeley's Institute of Personality and Social Research who was not connected to the study, said the results "provided an elegant demonstration that individual differences on a conservative-liberal dimension are strongly related to brain activity." Analyzing the data, Sulloway said liberals were 4.9 times as likely as conservatives to show activity in the brain circuits that deal with conflicts, and 2.2 times as likely to score in the top half of the distribution for accuracy.

Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.

Based on the results, he said, liberals could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas. "There is ample data from the history of science showing that social and political liberals indeed do tend to support major revolutions in science," said Sulloway, who has written about the history of science and has studied behavioral differences between conservatives and liberals.

Gallup on the Theory of Evolution in America...

[The Cat]

The Neocons' War on Reality: Killing the Referees

Killing the Referees: The Republican Assault on Political Accountability (September 2005)
http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2005/09 ... lt-on.html

Ed Kilgore:
''Any source of objective measurement has been systematically discredited as inherently ideological: scientists are secularist fanatics; the media are elitist liberals; the judiciary is full of anti-Christian activists; the opposition party is anti-American. We've all had much fun with the conservative characterization of "liberals" as "reality-based," but it's no laughing matter: the essence of Rovism is to eliminate any zone of rational persuasion and force Americans to pick sides in an identity politics of real and perceived privileges under imaginary assault. So if we do not happily cooperate with the GOP in reducing all politics to our team versus their team, and our "truth" versus their "truth," to what higher standard can we appeal? And that gets back to the problem of accountability in an age with few uncontested facts and no credible referees to keep a score card."

Kilgore puts his finger on the heart of the problem. Over the last two decades, the Republican political machine has engaged in a relentless and systematic assault on all of the institutions in our society that have traditionally served as checks on excessive partisanship. They have attacked the press, the judiciary, academia, even the very concepts of science and empiricism. Their goal is to discredit and disable the referees, to politicize, marginalize, and co-opt any and all non-political institutions, and thereby eliminate any meaningful policing of political discourse. (...)

In a relatively short period of time, conservatives have managed to convince a large segment of the population (including most of the Republican base) that the media, the judiciary, and even science itself cannot be trusted. Beyond damaging their credibility, this withering assault has actually transformed the institutions themselves. Fear of the "liberal bias" charge has effectively emasculated much of the press corps. The federal judiciary has been disproportionately stacked with reactionaries and Federalist Society-types. And our scientific and empirical knowledge has been polluted and corrupted by pseudo-science and ideologically-driven research. We've reached a point where nearly all truth is politicized. The line separating facts from spin has been hopelessly blurred, and political discourse has become a joke.

Comment by Jackmac
My worry is that the day of reckoning will come so late that those responsible will skip away without suffering the consequences and the damage they caused will be nearly impossible to fix. Can you imagine a Democratic president taking office in 2009 faced with a collapsed military, a trillion dollar deficit, a severe recession and social upheaval? It's not a far-fetched scenario. And the new president's attempts to fix these problems and restore budget sanity will be hooted down by the same hypocritical right wing assholes who hounded Bill Clinton and touted Dear Leader as the greatest president ever. It's a sickening prospect and I fear the country my children will inherit will be a shadow of what America should be: strong, idealistic and prosperous.

Neocons are driven by ideology, not reason. Illiberals, they despise anything liberal!


http://www.anonymousliberal.com/2005/12 ... anoia.html

All Republican political problems are still best explained by pointing to some vast conspiracy of liberal elites. Are conservatives really this paranoid, or is this merely a cynical and calculated political strategy? (...) The answer depends on the person. For Powertools like John Hinderaker, the paranoia may well be genuine. But for many others, this type of argument is simply the continuation of a long-running GOP political strategy: killing the referees.

(quoting Jacob Weisberg): Habitual spin is irksome, especially to the journalists upon whom it is practiced, but it does not threaten democracy. Propaganda is far more malignant. A calculated and systematic effort to manage public opinion, it transcends mere lying and routine political dishonesty. When the Bush administration manufactures fake "news," suppresses real news, disguises the former as the latter, and challenges the legitimacy of the independent press, it corrodes trust in leaders, institutions, and, to the rest of the world, the United States as a whole.

Neocons aren't true to any Republican -libertarian- tradition. The worm inside the apple!


The Neocon agenda
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4MdyJDnSoI
Pat Buchanan & the Neocons
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugesi_gaqLU
Neocons & communist ideologically alike!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPWe9A5CHIw

Invasion of the Party Snatchers (in 3 parts)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYQDwHPSF5A&NR=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXS4dXbICEg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI1fiqrIUQA

Francis Fukuyama, a neocon apostase
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p9byI-GbjY
Fukuyama, revised position on Islam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px4np1wKaS8

[The Cat]

From Nietzsche to Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt & The Neocons -1/3

The Liberal Critique of Strauss, by Scott Horton (July 2006).
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html

In the last several months, the New York Times has run four pieces defending Leo Strauss from his critics. By comparison, the Times has run no pieces in which Strauss is actually criticized, which suggests an odd editorial posture. (...) each turns the very serious criticism of Strauss and his relationship with the American Neoconservative movement into a point of ridicule. The criticism is grossly distorted and key elements are misstated. (...)

The Liberal Critique of Strauss (from The Anatomy of Antiliberalism, by Stephen Holmes 1993):

(1) Strauss rejects the fundamental liberal idea that wide-open, uncensored public disagreement is a creative force, mobilizing decentralized knowledge and bringing it to bear on issues of public importance. Liberalism, above all, insists that the factual premises of the use of force must be tested in an open adversarial process, but Strauss’s entire philosophical posture is a sarcastic rejection of this idea. For Strauss, knowledge belongs to a few - we know ahead of time who can and who cannot contribute something serious to a discussion. This “closed club” view of knowledge and debate with its essentially anti-democratic premise contributed to the atmospherics of the Bush drive to war against Iraq.

(2) Strauss believed that the liberal-Enlightenment tradition was naïve, and in particular the notion of Enlightenment thinkers that “revelation” (religious myths and dreams) could be banned from politics (as noted below, this was the crux of Strauss’ dissertation done under the great Neo-Kantian Ernst Cassirer). For Strauss, this is impossible; the repressed will return; hence it is crucial for the secular few, the men of science, to bring religion into politics on their own terms. The American Neocons' bizarre alliance with America’s Religious Right follows directly from this analysis.

(3) One of the pillars of liberal democracy is the embrace of the Rule of Law, and the notion that no one, even the king or Executive, stands above the law. For Strauss this idea was foolishness. Strauss’ critique can be seen in his writings on Plato and Xenophon, but their origin clearly lies with the Nietzschean criticism of Christianity as a slave morality designed to trick and “tie down” the natural geniuses. Strauss applies this criticism to law; law spells weakness; law is a trick of the weak to tie down the strong. Hence, Strauss applauds the decisive leader who acts outside of the law to achieve his goals. Nevertheless, the consequences of Strauss’ dismissive attitude towards the Rule of Law can be seen today in the Neocon advocacy of jettisoning traditional norms of the law of armed conflict and in allowing the president to operate outside of clear criminal statutes (like FISA) (...)

(4) Strauss always said that liberalism was unable to defend itself; that it must be defended, if at all, by non-liberals, willing to go outside the rules. This argument again has a firmly Nietzschean aspect. While Strauss seeks to cast it in terms of writers of classical antiquity, it is hard to read much of his writings without having an image of Carl Schmitt come to mind. Strauss would present himself as a “savior” of liberalism, but in the end, like Schmitt, one must fear that he would “save” liberal democracy by putting it to death. (...)

Before his arrival in America, Strauss was blunt in these criticisms. After his arrival, he adopted a far more circumspect approach. After all, he was in America and writing in English, and his own philosophy would demand that he flatter or indulge national prejudices and write as if he believed in them. (...) These aspects of Neocon thought are extremely important to Americans today. While the Bush Administration cannot really be cast as a bearer of pure Neocon thought, it does appear to have embraced many of these ideas with gusto (...)

Both the Rothstein review and the Smith book attempt to present Strauss as a person right at home with the land to which he emigrated and its Enlightenment tradition. This is extremely doubtful. But it is an act of serious deception to present Strauss as “democracy’s best friend” (...) without at least making clear the deep-boring criticism that Strauss directs at American democracy.

And we know that deception (which he called 'noble lies' -much like the Islamic taqqiya-) was one of Strauss' major tenet...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Cassirer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Strauss

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Kristol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Kristol
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pipes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Wolfowitz
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz

[The Cat]

From Nietzsche to Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt & The Neocons -2/3


Strauss' intellectual Milieu, by Scott Horton (July 2006).
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/07/letter_16.html

Strauss’ writing at the time he went into emigration and started the series of moves that led, ultimately, to the United States, serves powerfully to show just how doubtful the current efforts to rehabilitate Strauss are. Two contemporaries weigh heavily in Strauss’ writing and thinking: Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. Strauss’ thinking and attitudes towards the politics of this seminal era make sense when seen against this background, but otherwise can be confusing. There seems little doubt that Strauss saw himself as an acolyte of Heidegger’s, and the thrust of his criticism of modern society (and his intellectually arrogant supposition to be the leader of a tiny clan of intellectuals who are fully cognizant of the depth of “the crisis of modern times”) and his fascination with texts of antiquity reveals a Heideggerian hallmark.

Carl Schmitt was likewise a critical influence on Strauss’ concept on the state, and Schmitt’s own positive assessment of Strauss’ work on Hobbes enabled Strauss to secure a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to study in Paris, and thus exit the disintegrating remains of Weimar Germany. As reflected by Strauss’ comments on Schmitt’s Der Begriff des Politischen (The Concept of the Political), there were few barbs hurled in this love fest. Like Diogenes Laërtius’ Pythagoras, Strauss puts his faith in the philosopher to salvage mankind from the cruel degradations of modern society. Schmitt, on the other hand, counts on the man of action. We might call it a guild distinction between an academically inclined lawyer and a philosopher tout court.

The Letter To Karl Löwith
[-We must repeat: we, “men of science,” - as our predecessors in the Arab Middle Ages called themselves - non habemus locum manentem, sed quaerimus…(4) And, what concerns this matter: the fact that the new right-wing Germany does not tolerate us says nothing against the principles of the right. To the contrary: only from the principles of the right, that is from fascist, authoritarian and imperial principles, is it possible with seemliness, that is, without resort to the ludicrous and despicable appeal to the droits imprescriptibles de l’homme(5) to protest against the shabby abomination.(6) I am reading Caesar’s Commentaries with deep understanding, and I think of Virgil’s Tu regere imperio… parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.(7) There is no reason to crawl to the cross, neither to the cross of liberalism, as long as somewhere in the world there is a glimmer of the spark of the Roman thought. And even then: rather than any cross, I’ll take the ghetto. (...)-](-see footnotes right below-).

In this letter, Strauss looks at the fate he faces in consequence of the Nazi seizure of power in Germany. He admits that it is impossible for him as a Jew to live under their regime, since they have adopted anti-Semitism as a keynote of their rule. But while expressing abhorrence at their anti-Semitism, Strauss consciously refuses fully to repudiate Nazi fascism. To the contrary, he accepts fascism as a legitimate bearer of “the principles of the right,” and he embraces them, namely: fascism, authoritarianism and imperialism. He then proceeds to ridicule the Enlightenment values of inalienable rights, quoting the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 (though he could just as easily have quoted the American Declaration of Independence), and he quotes a passage of Virgil’s Aeneid, a passage which Carl Schmitt was also fond of quoting.

I am convinced that this is a very candid statement of Strauss’ politics at the time he wrote it, a reading signaled by his confessional closing. Indeed, anyone who carefully reads Strauss’ book on Hobbes (Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft in ihrer Genesis, 1936, but largely complete in 1933; translated in English as The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis) or his dissertation, written on the anti-Enlightenment writer Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, would suspect these sentiments.

Concerned Footnotes
(4) Latin, “We don’t have a lasting place, but seek…” The key phrase locum manentum appears repeatedly in the Vulgate Bible. Strauss’ sense would appear to be a conflation of Maimonides and Nietzsche – something like this: deterritorialized, uprooted, men of science cannot in good conscience identify with any exclusive group; that is for lesser men. On the other hand, identifying with diaspora Judaism may be a useful bridge.

(5) French, “inalienable rights of man” - quoted from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, Aug. 26, 1789.

(6) In the original: “das meskine Unwesen,” the word “meskine” may be a Germanization of the French “mesquin” or Italian “meschino,” meaning “mean” or “shabby.”

(7) “Romans, be this thy care - these thine arts -/… to spare the humbled and/ to wear down the proud!” Virgil, Aeneid, lib. 6, line 851. In this quotation, Strauss characteristically elides the most famous portion of this passage, which relates to the obligation to “uphold the law of peace.” The passage is often quoted by Carl Schmitt.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Heinrich_Jacobi
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/friedrich-jacobi/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger

Some Neocons Hawks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Bloom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Wohlstetter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Perle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Feith

[Skenderbeg]

You hijacking this site for your far left wing propaganda.

[The Cat]

You hijacking this site for your far left wing propaganda.

What do you think of the Neocons? Of Leo Strauss influences... Stop whining and articulate something!

[byteresistor]

A proud leftwinger here. The majority of left have lost their marbles. There are idiots on both sides but it seems to me the left are the most uninformed on what their political standpoint really is about. I'd like to see where in the leftist "rulebook" it says we should tolerate everyone, even the intolerant (that's what we're seeing happening right now). Most of them are incapable of looking to the future (or reality for that matter) from a non-biased viewpoint.

Multiculturalism is a grand idea on paper but it is clear it doesn't really work in practise. They haven't really put any thought on the premise that what if, maybe, just maybe some cultures/whatever do not want any part of it. It's an idea that came from the left, not from all of humanity so what makes them think everyone WILL accept it, ever? It's a form of facism of the mind. *Accept it or else you're not as intelligent or evolved as us*. *Accept it or you're a racist*. And then they go marching on and protesting with people who have a very facist and intolerant view of the world. Like we have seen in europe with the far left shaking hands with radical Islamists.

Most of the left have this illusion that one day the whole of humanity will jump around on a green field, holding hands and sign gumbaya together. They are so blinded by their own agenda that it looks like a religion to me. Sometimes it also looks as if it's the only agenda some of these people have in mind. Personally I like the multicultural idea but like I said it doesn't work and I don't see it working in the foreseeable future either. And beign on the left doesn't prevent me from facing the facts or reality even if the facts may be something that go against some of my leftists views. This is also something many leftists would think as unthinkable. They'd rather live in a dream world than see the facts, in the fear that they might look like rightwingers.