Life or death class war: The ideological background of the United States neocons
Date: Tuesday, January 31 @ 01:05:59 UTC
Topic: US Foreign Policy


Life or death class war: The ideological background of neocons in the current Bush administration

By: Jutta Schmitt

From the Bolivarian Studies Circle "El Momoy" we report that we have been holding our study and discussion sessions throughout 2005, but for reasons beyond our control it wasn't possible for us to elaborate the summaries in the form of our usual protocols, which are available for all on the Internet, beginning with last Sunday's session of January 22.

January 22's session was focused on the subject of mental programming and manipulation of world population by the global elite and its mass media, as a result of the most recent news: the sudden reappearing of the “messages” of Osama Bin Laden, a figure that has been converted into a myth in the best Orwellian style, whose character "Emmanuel Goldstein" in the distopia "1984" shows surprising similarities with Bin Laden, who always serves the interests of the Bush Administration in their effort of imposing and consolidating a totalitarian social order, in other words, absolute control and subordination ... what they call "full spectrum dominance."

In order to understand the underlying ideology of the domestic and the foreign policy of the US government, which needs a high degree of open manipulation in order to be applied without big resistance and which can be qualified as fascist, we have been trying to research the political thinking of those philosophers and thinkers that constitute the ideological support of the so-called "neoconservatives," which currently occupy the White House and follow the guidelines traced in their Project for a New American Century, in perfect match with the interests of the post-industrial and energy military complex.

We have done this research, among other goals, in order to analyze and measure if we really are at the theoretical height of our class adversary, or if we perhaps are even superior, when we're proclaiming "Socialism of the 21st Century" from Venezuela and Latin America, which until now has been nothing but a colorful mixture of good ideas and serious proposals, but lacking theoretical stringency.

Hence, we have discovered that the conceptions of the German Carl Schmitt, a political philosopher and state jurist, who died in 1985, a notorious racist and apologist of the Nazi regime, seem to be decisive in the cosmo-vision of the "neoconservatives" that currently conform the Bush Administration.

Specifically, it's his conception of "the political" that powerfully has attracted our attention, because according to Schmitt, the field of politics is the differentiation between good and bad, friend and enemy, the latter being always understood as the "public enemy."

In detail, as Schmitt says, the sovereign -- preferably one single person who reflects the "general will" -- is not only in charge of establishing and preserving the internal political order, but when it is in danger, of declaring any adversary as the "absolute enemy," in order to ensure the stability and continuity of the internal political order.

Besides, Schmitt considers that in order to successfully eradicate the enemy it is perfectly legitimate to do away with the limits imposed by the legal order to accomplish that.

We have observed that this definition of the political” according to Carl Schmitt, contains the “scapegoat” conception and manipulation technique, taking into consideration that the scapegoat always rises or is being "invoked" by the dominant class in crucial moments when a crisis looms that threatens its existence, in order to ensure the continuity of the status quo by diverting the attention of the oppressed masses away from the real problem, and by redirecting it to a declared and artificially built-up "public enemy."

It is obvious that this conception of the "public enemy" or "scapegoat" used by the Nazi regime against Jews and political enemies, fully coincides with that of the current Bush administration when it proclaims the total and infinite war against "international terrorism," the new public enemy and scapegoat, this time with a primarily Arab-Muslim face, but that includes the national and international political adversaries of the American government alike.

Similarly, what has attracted our attention is the scheme according to which they proceed to "identify" and proclaim an enemy: In the case of Germany's Hitler it was the Reichtagsbrand (burning of the parliament building) in 1933, perpetrated by the Nazis and ascribed to the German Communist Party, event in the wake of which the state of emergency was declared "for the protection of the population and the state," which worked as a platform to consolidate the Nazi dictatorship.

In the case of Bush's America it was September 11, planned, coordinated and executed from the same high political, military and economical spheres in cooperation with intelligence agencies, ascribed to "Al Qaeda" and Osama bin Laden, in that manner providing the necessary justification for the demolition of the civil rights on the internal front by "Patriot Act" I and II, and by the trashing of international law on the external front by means of the "Bush Doctrine" of preventive war, all this in the name of preserving the national "security interests" of the American government, and to project its power around the planet at all levels.

We have verified that the famous statement by George W. Bush that his administration would proceed to "smoke the terrorists out of their wholes" wherever they may be, fully coincides with Carl Schmitt's notion, in which the executive, legislative and judiciary fields merge in the person of the fuehrer (be it a Hitler or a Bush), who, "in moments of big danger, creates and imparts the law and in this way protects it from abuse."

This means, according to Schmitt, that the real fuehrer always is, al the same time, judge. In this sense, Schmitt considers that judicial leadership emanates from the very political leadership. In an article published in 1934, entitled "The fuehrer protects the law," Schmitt asserts the following:

"Those who are able to grasp the whole, deep context of our political situation will understand the claims and warnings of the fuehrer, and will arm themselves for the giant spiritual battle which calls on us to defend our legitimate right."

We have agreed that this "legitimate right," that in the case of Nazi Germany was understood as the expansion of the geographical space to ensure the "Arian race" (and German capital) its "proper" vital space, today consists in the submission of the whole planet under the exclusive interests of corporate America.

Also and in this context, we have recalled the "battle of the ideas" as an intrinsic part of the American national security doctrine, which has expressed itself, among other ways, in the proclaiming of the "clash of civilizations" (Samuel Huntington), connecting neatly with the Schmittian notion of the "total enemy."

Schmitt's thought was influenced, among others, by philosophers like Thomas Hobbes with his notion of the absolute concentration of power in the hands of a super-state or "Leviathan"; Niccolo Machiavelli with his reflections on the power of logics and its astute use by the rulers; and Wilfredo Pareto with his notion of the eternal return of the elites.

Besides, we have encountered that the next ideological base of the neoconservatives is the thinking of a follower and protege of Schmitt himself, the American-German philosopher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who was influenced by Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich Nietsche and Martin Heidegger, yet also by the "classics," like Plato and Aristotle.

We have found that the intriguing and revealing political thought of Leo Strauss is characterized, in brief, by his unconditional affirmation of a totalitarian social order, preceded by some kind of rulers-philosophers similar to those in Plato's Politeia, who hold and hide the knowledge of the truth from the "ordinary masses" by disseminating myths, both of a political and religious nature, in order to keep the masses in their ignorant submission.

In this sense, Leo Strauss considers philosophy in itself a very dangerous thing, because it uses to question the ruling moral and therefore shakes the foundations of the social order, a matter that ignorant masses can't digest, whose mediocre minds, according to Strauss, are easily confusable and unable to assume, in a rational way, the consequences of philosophical knowledge.

This is how Strauss introduces his central conception, the so-called "Straussian text" -- a philosophical essay written in such a way that the common reader barely understands one thing, while only the illustrated reader, the few toward whom the text is really directed to, will understand its real meaning and implications.

Upon considering that philosophy tends to seed nihilism in the mediocre minds of the masses, Strauss advocates not to expose them to such dangers, reason for which he also affirms the fact, that throughout history the political authorities have been determined to silence certain philosophers, as was the famous case with Socrates, for instance. In other words, Strauss openly affirms censorship.

We have agreed that Strauss is an extraordinary example to show how important philosophical thinking is, especially when it becomes an ideological weapon against the class adversary, in the case of the ultra-elitist Strauss the oppressed working classes, whose "mediocre minds" must remain ignorant in all eternity. In the face of this elitist attitude, so radical, openly and categorically exclusive, we have been able to appreciate even more the huge magnitude of the problem that affects us here in Venezuela and in Latin America, which is the lack of a class conciousness likewise radical and clear by the opressed classes, the formation of which is, according to our criterium, conditio sine qua non to avoid that the dominant classes keep lying to us over and over again with their "dialogue" and "reconciliation" among the social classes in struggle.

We have come to know, that Strauss himself was convinced that the philosophers and thinkers of the past effectively wrote "Straussian texts," this is, texts written in codes, only understandable by the elite, in a mirror image of their respective class societies on the economic, political and cultural levels, societies consisting of owners and workers, rulers and ruled, and creators and audiences.

The crime committed by modern political philosophy, according to Strauss, consists in having wanted to abolish the strict class distinction in the name of liberty, leading to the leveling or "Bolchevization" of the mind with catastrophic consequences -- what Strauss calls "liberal nihilism" or the loss of a moral order and value system preferably based on religion, which faithfully respects the rigid distinction of the social classes.

Being an atheist who considered Judeo-Christian religion a fraud, Strauss was at the same time a fierce defender of it, because he considered it a big necessity for ordinary people, to keep them entertained and away from philosophy.

For Strauss it was enough that a reduced group of people belonging to the elite had the detailed knowledge of the truth, while the masses should be taught the strictly necessary in order to enable them to accomplish their function within the system, and nothing else.

For Strauss, the central thinker in the history of philosophy, the one who marked the point of no return on the road towards the degeneration of classic philosophy into modern political philosophy, is Machiavelli, who has committed the grave sin of revealing the crude and rude truth before the eyes of all.

We have found that among Strauss' disciples, followers and proteges figure the Secretary of Defense Ronald Rumsfeld, former sub-secretary of Defense and current president of the World Bank Paul Wolfowitz, Vice-president Dick Cheney, Attorney General of the US John Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas, Judge of the Supreme Court, Weekly Standard editor and political commentator in Fox News Channel William Kristol, apart from other figures like Gary Schmitt, co-founder, president and director of the Project for a New American Century; Irving Kristol, Michael Ledeen and Jane Kirkpatrick from the American Enterprise Institute (the latter was a former adviser in foreign politics of Ronald Reagan and former ambassador of the U.S. in the United Nations); the authors Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington, and the former editor of the weekly magazine "Comment" from the Committee of American Jews, Norman Podhoretz, among others.

In the face of such a panorama, we have asked us the following questions:

Are we, regarding our approach of “Socialism of the 21st Century”, really taking into account the huge challenge the adversary is posing to us in the theoretical-philosophical field?

Are we aware that what we are facing is the ideology of world fascism, and that maybe our religious teachings and ethical appealings before a world elite that will not hesitate to eliminate us from the face of the earth as its real class enemy, are not enough to meet the challenge?

Do we have it clear, indeed, what are the implications of postulating socialism, that is, the scientific and philosophic, praxical and theoretical negation of capitalism and fascism?

These questions are getting all the more important when we consider that following our discussion a friend of ours draw our attention to a booklet that lately has been circulating on different levels of the State's educational institutions, edited and distributed by the same Ministry of Education and also the National Guard, consisting of a "secular moral guide" which substitutes or at least is sort of a supplement to the traditional religious morals, entitled "The Road to Happiness."

By looking deeper into the subject, we have realized that this "new" "moral code" has nothing to do with any serious and responsible approach to a possible “Socialism of the 21st Century” that goes beyond the mere and empty ethical appeals, and besides we have found, that this “moral code” emanates from the notoriously known Church of Scientology, which is why we are suspecting this is about an ideological infiltration directed against the real revolutionary and socialist thinking, and that is also why we have agreed to retake and deepen this topic in our next meeting.

Jutta Schmitt
jutta@vheadline.com

http://www.vheadline.com/jutta_schmitt

JUTTA SCHMITT, M.A., Political Science, Philosophy & Sociology is an Assistant Lecturer (ad honorem) in Political Science at the University de Los Andes (ULA) in Merida.
You may email Jutta Schmitt at jutta@vheadline.com

http://www.vheadline.com/readnews.asp?id=47867







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