Conservatism and hegemony posted by lenin

Great article by Corey Robin on the history and strategy of American conservatism.

Labels: alexander hamilton, barry goldwater, conservatism, edmund burke, hegemony, joseph de maistre, neoconservatism, segregation

A Lonely Outpost of Civilization posted by lenin

This frontiersman holds a lonely vigil. Gazing wistfully across the terrain from a desolate watchtower, he sees the barbarians gather their forces. Illiberal. Despotic. Pre-Enlightened. Irrational. And, most terrible of all, utterly incapable of appreciating the lofty ends to which he has dedicated himself. It is perfectly maddening. In a manly fashion he gathers his nerve, holds his chin aloft, and presses the button marked 'civilization'. In seconds, a cruise missile whizzes noiselessly past the reinforced windows, streaks across the barren land, and slams into the hordes of ingrates. His satisfaction at the pacific effect this has is despoiled, however, by the thought of treachery within. He thinks of those who are "ready to undermine our struggle and support our deadly enemies in all these places". He reaches for the education pamphlet and directs his attention to the 'squared circle'. How, he wonders, could anyone fail to be impressed by its pedagogic simplicity?



In its minimalist beauty it draws out a multitude of relations, distills thousands of concepts into their essentials, and throws the most obscure dimensions of global politics into sharp relief. It bears the magisterial authority of Renan, Spengler, Schmitt, Strauss and Huntington. Who could refuse it? Only cynics, naysayers and nihilists. Only the enemies of reason and Enlightenment! His reverie is interrupted by a ferocious din - some of the more restless natives are being interrogated in a chamber below his station. They can wail like banshees, call down curses, fret, weep, imprecate, invoke the authority of the Almighty - but they usually quieten down as they dangle from the strappado and the pressure gathers on their chest. The agonised howling goes on. He smiles as he hears a familiar crackle: the modern miracle of electricity!

His grin fades as he reflects on what a grim business it all is, and he resumes his meditations on the troubling domestic treachery. The Lord Wellington Society has published several articles of his on this very topic. The problem of active subversion is itself the most manageable problem. Essentially, they can be eliminated in much the same way as the unfortunate captives in the floor below. Even more worrisome are idle critics who, from the comfort of homes protected by he and his Rough Riders Militia, give all manner of comfort to the subversives and, in so doing, provide the best aid to an implacable foe. There will have to be a purge, he resolves. When this territory is at last settled and cultivated with the values of liberal modernity, the Riders will reconquer the homeland. A healthy society cannot long stomach these illiberal, intolerant elements. In the meantime, he spots another battalion of deceptively unarmed Islamofascists sweeping in from the slum quarters of the city, bearing portraits of their riff-raff leader. Some appear to be carrying miniature coffins. "Sorry chaps," he mutters sternly, "but this is an unauthorised manifestation of anti-liberal chauvinism." Within moments, he has called in the helicopters. The ground reddens, the sky blackens, and a depuratory fire consumes the terrorists before discharging them in splendid atramentous pulses into the atmosphere. From all directions the elegant copters converge, circle above in an elegaic dance and discharge round after round of liberal democratic values. Amid the Wagnerian glory of this Gotterdammerung, our frontiersman pauses to transcribe the lapidary thought: "There is No Left or Right; There Is Only Us and Them; If You Are Not With Us, You Are With Them. Exterminate All The Brutes!"

Labels: after the cataclysm, clash of civilisations, friend/enemy distinction, huntington, imperial ideology, leo strauss, neoconservatism, orientalism, renan, schmitt, spengler, west

Buckley posted by lenin

He's dead. Good. The affection in which this rather unpleasant High Tory sprog of an oil baron is held is unsurprising and rather appropriate to the age. After all, look at his credentials: former CIA agent; a confederate of James Burnham, one of the earliest neoconservatives; a McCarthyite; a Goldwater guy; a defender of segregation who also thought uneducated whites should be denied the vote and, almost as a corollary, an explicit devotee of empire; and a trashy spy novelist on top of it all! With this commixture of white supremacism and white trash, what's not to love?

Labels: imperialism, neoconservatism, segregation, william f buckley jr

Oh, what a beautiful mourning. posted by lenin

I could almost have called this post 'How neoconservatives perish' if the title wasn't already spoken for. When Harry and Dave mourn together, you know a warmonger is dead. In this case, it is Tom Lantos, a Henry Jackson Democrat who recently kicked the bucket. I have little interest in Lantos, but since he is the object of post-mortem encomium and praise, it's worth looking at what the warmongers find so loveable.

Lantos is praised by his mourners for having resisted the Nazi death squads in Hungary, which is indeed immensely creditable. However, the sole reason he is really being mourned by these chumps is because he supported US foreign policy with a great deal of pecksniffery about human rights. Of course, he does have a reputation for supporting human rights, but it is entirely undeserved. He supported military appropriations for El Salvador's death squads at a time when the local ruling class was literally inclined toward genocide according to US analysts. He supported America's bombing of Tripoli, that actually killed up to 100 civilians, and in fact regretted that America was not aggressive enough in taking "punitive strikes" of that kind. When the Iran-Contra affair blew up, he told Oliver North that he regarded him with "respect, admiration and affection," and said it would be a privilege to make a financial contribution to a defense fund established by the lieutenant colonel's Naval Academy classmates. He defended the American state's incestuous relationship with the Saudi dictatorship on the grounds that it supplied a great deal of oil. It is true that Lantos co-founded the Congressional Human Rights Foundation, but then this was effectively a front for the PR firm Hill & Knowlton, which is often used to devise 'humanitarian' cover for American wars and pro-US dictators and ethnic cleansers and so on. The same Hill & Knowlton switchboard that forwarded calls for Lantos and chums was also performing the same service for Suharto and the leaders of the FRAPH in Haiti. The foundation received its cash from the NED, and also from that other front organisation, the Committee to Free Kuwait, and on its board was vice-chair of Hill & Knowlton, Frank Mankiewicz (one of Lantos' friends). One of his other concerns, the Congressional Human Rights caucus, was important in disseminating propaganda during the first Gulf War.

It is true that Lantos hadn't liked the idea of supporting either side in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, but then his main concern was Israel (AIPAC loved him for his devotion to the blue and white), and I might add he never wasted a word criticising anything Israel might to do the Palestinians that he so reviled. He did pretend to support the Kurds of Iraq, but he was also a long-time defender of the Turkish state. He was a Holocaust-denier when it came to the Armenian genocide, until such time as Tayyip Erdogan's government made friends with Iran and Syria, at which point he abruptly turned on his heel and voted to censure Turkey's genocide - not, as he made clear, for any principled reason, but just to punish the Turkish government for its political mis-steps. In the end, Lantos was a miserable apologist for Bush's war in Iraq, having promised Colette Avital of the Israeli Labour Party that the US would impose "a pro-Western dictator, who will be good for us and for you". And he rebuked criticism of its scandalous Guantanamo gulag (which latter point made him a hero to the neocons). So, let's drop the pretense that he was a lifelong freedom fighter. Once you've supported death squads and dictators, and sacrificed the truth about one of the biggest extermination campaigns of the twentieth century on the altar of a geopolitical alliance with a racist state, you don't get to call yourself a supporter of human rights and a fierce opponent of genocide any more. In reality, he spent a great deal of time advocating American expansion and the aggressive pursuit of its interests, which often involved criticising the human rights record of opponents of the US while supporting America's worst atrocities. In pursuit of this, he commingled the exact same proportion of bombast, sanctimony and realpolitik with respect to American foreign policy that every neoconservative does. Like other hawkish Democrats, he just didn't share the neoconservative hostility to liberal nostrums such as environmentalism, gay rights or welfare.

Well, doesn't that just sum up the isomorphic relationship between neoconservatism and the 'pro-war Left'? Hitchens would probably be a neoconservative if they weren't hung up on religion and 1950s Americanism. Berman was persuaded of the neoconservative case over Iraq, and explains that he would have loved to be wholly with them, but they regarded his "drippy, left-wing" language about progress and so on with contempt, and he could never understand their domestic agenda in the 'culture wars'. BHL, interviewing William Kristol, was alarmed by the latter's support for the death penalty, but exuberant about a generation of American intellectuals committed to human rights and so on. They are so close, yet not close enough. They network together, dine together, appreciate one another's jokes, sign one another's petitions. Oh, but then some silly issue comes up at the dinner table. A neocon will say that the liberal support for egalitarian permissiveness dilutes the martial values and strong work ethic that America needs to defend itself. A liberal warmonger will reply that the neoconservative hostility to gender equality, gay rights, and social welfare makes a mockery of their support for the humanitarian agenda internationally. Yes, one neocon will reply, but not all neoconservatives oppose gay rights and it isn't as important as ensuring the conditions for freedom in which civil society can fight for such rights. But, the liberal hawk avers, not all neoconservatives supported democracy in Haiti and your record has been spotty to say the least, what with the mass terror in Central America - we have the advantage of consistency, or at least some of us do. Yes, the neocon godfather interrupts from the top of the table, but your 'consistency' is purchased at the price of impotence. If you don't play the game of real politics and aren't prepared to support America's real interests even if it means getting your hands bloody in the short-term, even if it means torture chambers and death squads and a bit of rape, then no one will listen to you and your words amount to nothing. The world isn't a nice place, much as we would like it to be, and we must do what is in America's interests, because those are the interests of democracy. So, one timorous liberal who isn't sure he should be there chips in, are you saying that support for human rights is a rhetorical component of the struggle for American supremacy which will eventually deliver strong liberal capitalist societies for most of the world? Doesn't that actually suck? At which point the rest of the table in one voice tell him to shut up.

Labels: democracy promotion, neocons, neoconservatism, obituary, pro-war 'left'

What's Missing From This Picture? posted by lenin

The Washington Post has created an illustration of the progress of the neocons. As you will see, it includes the usual deliberately confusing mess. It includes William F Buckley, a traditional High Tory intellectual, in the neoconservative estuary, simply because of his connection with James Burnham. It includes Libertarian strangeness from Ayn Rand, which doesn't strictly belong. It includes people who never really became neocons, and it excludes those who did but started as straightforward Cold War Liberals. But it does so all to the purpose of linking it all back to a dead revolutionary, who in all likelihood would have had the neocons taken on a blind date with a firing squad (I like that phrase). As usual, the main vector for this is the Shachtmanites, although most of those neocons who came under the influence of Shacthman did so late in his career, when he had become a leading right-wing social democrat and a supporter of the US in Vietnam. However, there is one very important thing missing from this picture (click on the image below). If anyone can tell me what it is in three syllables or less, they will win a pat on the head.

Labels: cold war, liberals, neoconservatism

Muslims - not coming after all. posted by lenin

BBC Newsnight has taken a holiday and decided to investigate some news - credit where it's due, they've come up with the goods. The story in question is the revelation that this year's Policy Exchange report on Islam in the UK was a dangerous fraud (watch here). It transpires that one of the key elements of the report - an alarmist claim that a quarter of UK mosques sell 'hate literature' (which is still well below the 100% rate at which UK newsagents sell hate literature) - was backed up by a bunh of phoney receipts, suggesting that the researchers had confected evidence for a pre-conceived thesis.

Osama Saeed hints at further skullduggery:

Edinburgh Central Mosque was one of those fingered by the report. I said at the time that the mosque had no idea how this literature was supposed to be on their premises. A strange thing then happened a week or two later. A stash of the pamphlets in question were dropped just inside the doorway to the mosque. No one has any idea how they appeared there, as certainly none of the mosque authorities ordered them. Someone clearly outside dumped them, and they are currently investigating who that could be.

As I pointed out at the time, the report was written by a curious alliance of neoconservative reactionaries and Furedites. The latter, Trotskyists turned think-tankies (admittedly, always rather eccentric Trotskyists), now make their home at Spiked Online. They also host regular corporate-sponsored events attacking the scientific mainstream on 'climate change' and other ideas that may prove problematic for capital accumulation. The former are foils for the Conservative Party. Before neoconservative Michael Gove became a Tory MP, he was the Chair and co-founder of Policy Exchange. The current Chair is occupied by Charles Moore, the former editor of the Daily Telegraph and supporter of the Tories. Previous reports by the Exchange have been criticised for regurgitating a Tory agenda. One of the authors of the report who appeared on Newsnight is Dean Godson, a British neoconservative who fancies himself as a dispenser of wisdom on civilizational clashes. Of course, the Policy Exchange recognises allies when it sees them, and took the trouble to publish Martin Bright's Muslim-baiting report 'When Progressives Treat with Reactionaries' - which, summarising Observer wisdom on the question, was regarded by Britain's reactionaries as an instant classic.

Although this report and its producers have been comprehensively trashed, the ideological coordinates which produce this bilge are still being traversed daily. Hence, we are at war with Islam; Islam = 9/11; Muslim moderates aren't 'speaking out'; they must be punished; they're outbreeding us; their minarets are too bloody prominent, anyway. And so, the breathless anticipation of full-blooded cultural duel mounts daily in the neocon breast. If and when it finally comes to fruition, they will not forget the weaklings and capitulationists and fellow-travellers and fifth columnists on their own side.

Labels: belligerati, islam, islamophobia, neoconservatism, pro-war 'left'

Gordon Brown, neocon. posted by lenin

An overstatement, perhaps. The more precise formula is that he is a reformist who became a neoliberal. But I think it worth pointing out, in light of the delusions among Labourites that Brown is going to thumb his nose at American policy simply because he isn't quite as far up Bush's arse as Blair was, that Brown has been flirting with the neoconservatives for some time. This weird tendency manifested itself with his statements on Empire as something for Britons to be proud of and stop apologising for (shortly thereafter, Blair had to apologise for and express shame about the Empire's extensive involvement in and coordination of the slave trade). Then there was the friendly review of Irwin Stelzer's volume on neoconservatism (the volume reproduced Blair's 1999 Chicago speech). Then there was the citation of the ultra-reactionary Gertrude Himmelfarb, neocon wife of Irving Kristol, as his guru. Brown is closer to the Democrats than the Republicans, but it is the neoconservative brand of Democrat that he likes. In tonight's white tie speech in front of the Lord Mayor of London and the cream of Britain's capitalist class, Gordon Brown is to support the American government's threats to Iran, boost NATO, attack 'anti-Americanism' etc etc. The neocons are not about to go out of business in Downing Street anytime soon.

Labels: gordon brown, neoconservatism, new labour