Just like in the state of Minnesota,
every other state and local race has two sides pitted against one another and
it isn’t the Republican vs. the Democrat.
It is the conservative vs. the liberal.
Unlike the national race for President, there are good men and women
trying to bring redress for the grievances we have grown to accept as a people;
but far too few. In the race for
President, the Republican John McCain and regardless the Democrat, Clinton or
Obama, are largely from the same pot of soup and differ only by degree. McCain falls in the liberal wing of the
Neo-Con movement, which when you understand the inner workings of a true
conservative, you’ll realize is an oxymoron.
At this juncture our only hope is to understand these things and take
action as our founding fathers did to right these wrongs. We must understand that if we have rights
that come from God we also have the obligation and duty to take action
accordingly.
It was Natural Law that provided the
indignation and the impetus to our forefathers to set this society and its laws
up, and is perfectly exemplified in the movie The Jack Bull. We can take our cue from this to learn what
motives men to be so committed that they would risk everything for the sake of
justice, namely Natural Law. As a first
step we must take the time to see why today’s conservatives are nothing more
than yesterday’s liberal, and today’s liberal is nothing but yesterday’s
communist. For that, I offer an article
written and published in October 2004 by Jim Lobe.
The Strauss Model or The Philosophy of Deception
Many neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz are
disciples of a philosopher who believed that the
elite should use deception, religious fervour and perpetual war to control the
ignorant masses.
What would you do if you wanted to topple Saddam
Hussein, but your intelligence agencies couldn't find the evidence to justify a
war? A follower of Leo Strauss may just
hire the "right" kind of men to get the job done ? people with the intellect, acuity, and, if
necessary, the political commitment, polemical skills, and, above all, the
imagination to find the evidence that career intelligence officers could not
detect.
The "right" man for Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz, suggests Seymour Hersh in his recent New Yorker article
entitled 'Selective Intelligence,' was Abram Shulsky, director of the Office of
Special Plans (OSP) ? an
agency created specifically to find the evidence of WMDs and/or links with Al
Qaeda, piece it together, and clinch the case for the invasion of Iraq.
Like Wolfowitz, Shulsky is a student of an obscure
German Jewish political philosopher named Leo Strauss who arrived in the United States
in 1938. Strauss taught at several major universities, including Wolfowitz and
Shulsky's alma mater, the University
of Chicago, before his
death in 1973.
Strauss is a popular figure among the
neoconservatives. Adherents of his ideas include prominent figures both within
and outside the administration. They include 'Weekly Standard' editor William
Kristol; his father and indeed the godfather of the neoconservative movement,
Irving Kristol; the new Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Stephen
Cambone, a number of senior fellows at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)
(home to former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle and Lynne Cheney),
and Gary Schmitt, the director of the influential Project for the New American
Century (PNAC), which is chaired by Kristol the Younger.
Strauss' philosophy is
hardly incidental to the strategy and mindset adopted by these men ? as is obvious in Shulsky's 1999 essay titled
"Leo Strauss and the World of Intelligence (By Which We Do Not Mean
Nous)" (in Greek philosophy the term nous denotes the highest form
of rationality). As Hersh notes in his article, Shulsky and his co-author
Schmitt "criticize America's
intelligence community for its failure to appreciate the duplicitous nature of
the regimes it deals with, its susceptibility to social-science notions of
proof, and its inability to cope with deliberate concealment." They argued
that Strauss's idea of hidden meaning, "alerts one to the possibility that
political life may be closely linked to deception. Indeed, it suggests that
deception is the norm in political life, and the hope, to say nothing of the
expectation, of establishing a politics that can dispense with it is the
exception."
Rule One: Deception
It's hardly surprising then why Strauss is so popular
in an administration obsessed with secrecy, especially when it comes to matters
of foreign policy. 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. According to Shadia Drury, who teaches politics
at the University
of Calgary, Strauss
believed that "those who are fit to rule are those who realize there is
no morality and that there is only one natural right - the right of the superior to rule over the
inferior."
This dichotomy requires "perpetual
deception" between the rulers and the ruled, according to Drury. Robert
Locke, another Strauss analyst says,"The people are told what they need to
know and no more." While the elite few are capable of absorbing the
absence of any moral truth, Strauss thought, the masses could not cope. If
exposed to the absence of absolute truth, they would quickly fall into nihilism
or anarchy, according to Drury, author of 'Leo Strauss and the American Right'
(St. Martin's 1999).
Second Principle: Power of Religion
According to Drury, Strauss had a "huge
contempt" for secular democracy. 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." As Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine points
out, "Neoconservatives are pro-religion even though they themselves may
not be believers."
"Secular society in their view is the worst
possible thing,'' 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."
Not surprisingly, Strauss' attitude toward foreign
policy was distinctly Machiavellian. "Strauss thinks that a political
order can be stable only if it is united by an external threat," Drury
wrote in her book. "Following Machiavelli, he maintained that if no
external threat exists then one has to be manufactured (emphases
added)."
"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."
As to what a Straussian
world order might look like, the analogy was best captured by the philosopher
himself in one of his - and student Allen Bloom's many allusions to Gulliver's Travels. In
Drury's words, "When Lilliput was on fire, Gulliver urinated over the
city, including the palace. In so doing, he saved all of Lilliput from
catastrophe, but the Lilliputians were outraged and appalled by such a show of
disrespect."
The image encapsulates the
neoconservative vision of the United
States' relationship with the rest of the
world - as
well as the relationship between their relationship as a ruling elite with the
masses. "They really have no use for liberalism and democracy, but
they're conquering the world in the name of liberalism and democracy,"
Drury says.
October 25, 2004
Jim Lobe
