Prince of Darkness, Seismology, Nukes, Dejavu and your personal scientist

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T2,
in a belateted response.... you missed my point when you wrote this:

He was playing with his team, which was in part in (the whips) and in part outside (the intellectual and propaganda wing) of the administration. The neo-cons are a loose network. What they share is a distinct ideological view and long time contacts; they meet a lot off the record. To quote Scooter Libby's poetic words to Judith Miller:

Look at Wolfowitz, one day booted out of the Worldbank, almost the next day back home at the AEI.

You can easily play with your group, when you routinely exchange your info and views on the hotwire. There was and is no one giving Perle orders. Nobody needs to tell Perle what to do. He knows exactly what to do when he is to address a report of Soviet compliance: It becomes a report of alleged Soviet compliance, with the addition that not all the science is yet in, and there is reason to doubt.... *gravitas* a LOT of reason. */gravitas* Kind of like with Global Warming.

In that sense he plays alone locally, with the team globally.

You have to keep in mind that Perle is not only nuts, but that there is method to this madness, and an objective. The neo-cons only start to really become interesting when one looks there. It is worth the effort.

 

I would say that the formation of a policy and then a scramble for supporting data is an element of all governments, if only in many cases they don't want to reveal the real reason for their formation of said policy. Sometimes they have national security in mind, but more often they have greed and corrupt agendas. I certainly don't think that it's solely the purview of right wingers (I'm curious as to what constitutes a "neo-con" in these debates? Anyone who has a right wing solution is one even if he is a card carrying Democrat? Please elaborate for me.)

 

LKD, I don't know for the boards, but this is what they are to me:

You could add stuff like 'former Marxist', 'Trotzkyite' and member of Young People's Socialist League of the Socialist Party of America for the first generation, people like Kirkpatrick.
It is instructive to read Fukuyama's critiques of currently applied neo-concervatism. He accuses them of Leninism, which has to be understood as a critique of them going astray from their original Trotzkyism. Ledeen illustrates this with his creative destruction thesis, in a sense a version of Trotzky's perpetual revolution.

Fukuyama's essay about the end of history and the last man is helpful to understand the Nitzshean part of neo-conservative ideas.

Perle is in the second generation and one of the students of Allan Bloom, himself a disciple of strauss, with Wolfowitz, and amusingly enough, Chalabi. Generally the original neo-cons migrated from the left to the right about 1973. The newest generation of neo-cons is harder to define.

Folks like David Frum lack the direct influences cited above. He is out of their class.

A canuck, Shadia Drury, wrote an excellent book: 'Leo Strauss and the American Right'. Strauss influence can be summed up as that Strauss is the philosopher that legitimizes the Nietzsheian principles of the neo-conservatives. He believed that the common people were unable to deal with the truth; that there is no God, no Nation, no Justice, no Equality, no God-given human rights. Noble lies are necessary to govern properly. If not deceived the people will lead the nation to destruction.

That is a direct result of Strauss experience with the Nazis. Kirkpartrick illustrates that with her quote: "As long as you can change the rulers - the government - and preserve political competition, then I don't worry about losing freedom" It is no accident that the neo-cons are a bipartisan phenomenon. The people have to be led, no matter what party is in power.

Not neo-cons are Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bolton (maybe the last two became one along the way), but originally they all were simply aggressive nationalists. Bush is not a neo-con. I think they share the authoritarian tendencies of Straussians, probably for different reasons.

 

Hmm. So what you're saying is (and I'm really trying not to put words into anyone's mouth here) is that neo-cons are people from either side of the standard "Liberal - Conservative" argument who believe that the general populace are foolish and cannot be trusted, so they feel it is acceptable to lie to said populace in order to achieve the goals that the elite have set?

If that's the case, and if many of the neo-cons are in fact influenced by traditional leftist folks like Trotsky and Lenin, perhaps it would be good for the people worldwide to come up with a different word for these people in order to separate them from the conservatives, who (IMHO) simply stand for tradition and less government intrusion into the lives of citizens.

Because as I said, the use of propaganda is surely not the sole domain of the right wing.

 

I think the word 'Neo-Jacobins' is quite apt.