Still waiting to hear back from anti-war on the question,"La Voz de
Atzlan,a libertarian asset?"
Don't attack neoconservatives. it's a 'hate crime'!
Max Boot starts out his essay on "What the Heck is a 'Neocon?'" which
should have been titled "Who, Me?" by claiming to find the label affixed
to his political persona "mystifying." Yet he winds up writing a
mini-manifesto of the Neocon Creed:
"It is not really domestic policy that defines neoconservatism. This was a
movement founded on foreign policy, and it is still here that
neoconservatism carries the greatest meaning, even if its original raison
d'�tre opposition to communism has disappeared."
The neocons may have wavered and waffled on domestic policy issues, arguing
among themselves over how many cheers to give capitalism (one, or two?),
but on the war question they have always spoken with a single hoarse voice,
howling for war at the slightest provocation. Not only that, but they
positively delight in the prospect of bloodshed, which they perversely find
ennobling: it was Max Boot, after all, who bemoaned the lack of casualties
in the Afghan campaign and fervently hoped not to be disappointed in the
next phase of what his fellow neocons optimistically call World War IV.
9/11 galvanized the neocons, who immediately jumped at the opportunity to
turn the "war on terrorism" into the sort of general conflagration that
might fairly be dubbed a new world war. As Boot describes the neocon argument:
"If we are to avoid another 9/11, they argue, we need to liberalize the
Middle East a massive undertaking, to be sure, but better than the
unspeakable alternative. And if this requires occupying Iraq for an
extended period, so be it; we did it with Germany, Japan and Italy, and we
can do it again."
Either build an empire on the ruins of Baghdad, Damascus, and Riyadh, or
else suffer another attack by our implacable enemies, who are not just the
Bin Ladenites skulking in their caves but all the Muslim peoples of the
Middle East (except the Turks). "What is a neoconservative in the year
2003?" asks Boot in the first paragraphs of his screed, and by the end he
seems considerably less puzzled:
"The most prominent champions of this view inside the administration are
Vice President Dick Cheney and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
Their agenda is known as 'neoconservatism,' though a more accurate term
might be 'hard Wilsonianism.' Advocates of this view embrace Woodrow
Wilson's championing of American ideals but reject his reliance on
international organizations and treaties to accomplish our objectives.
('Soft Wilsonians,' a k a liberals, place their reliance, in Charles
Krauthammer's trenchant phrase, on paper, not power.) Like Theodore
Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, 'hard Wilsonians' want to
use American might to promote American ideals."
By dressing up the War Party's militant triumphalism in presidential
trappings, Boot hopes to Americanize what is essentially an alien, European
tradition, one that owes more to Trotsky than Teddy. "I like to think I've
been in touch with reality from day one," avers Boot, "since I've never
been a Trotskyite [sic], a Maoist or even a Democrat." Boot's oblivious
disdain for history, and his obvious unfamiliarity with the rightist axiom
that "ideas have consequences," as Richard Weaver put it, seems odd in an
ostensible "conservative" of any sort.
As many of the original neocons were ex-Trotskyists, or independent
left-wing critics of Stalinism whose Russian colleagues were sent to the
gulag, and whose leader met his end on Stalin's orders their foreign policy
monomania is best understood as Trotsky's revenge. The founder of the Red
Army had wanted to carry the struggle into Poland, and Germany, after the
1917 Revolution, and this later developed into a comprehensive critique of
Stalin's policy of "socialism in one country." Throughout the cold war era,
Trotsky's renegade followers called for "rolling back" their old enemies,
the Stalinists but even the implosion of the Soviet empire did not calm
their crusading instincts.
All this is ancient history, Boot and his fellow crusaders complain. Yet
"benevolent world hegemony," the fatuous phrase in which William Kristol
and Robert Kagan summed up the goal of a neocon post-cold war foreign
policy, has a positively Soviet ring to it. The idea that the U.S.
government must "export democracy" at gunpoint all around the world is a
frankly revolutionary program, profoundly alien to the American
conservative ethos that considers hubris a sin and distrusts power in the
hands of imperfect men. The idea of democratism in one country that
constitutional republicanism can thrive only in the West, because of
cultural and historical factors is anathema to these militant
internationalists. The neoconservative anomaly is that they have succeeded
in redefining "conservatism" as Trotskyism turned inside out.
That the third or fourth generation of rightists seems unaware of or
indifferent to their ideological legacy merely underscores the success of
the "entrist" infiltration tactic often used by Trotskyists over the years.
Trotsky and his followers, in league with Sidney Hook a major neocon icon
did this in the Socialist Party in the 1930s, and the Trotskyists became
infamous for their skill at infiltration. (The most recent example was the
discovery of French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's membership in a
secretive Trotksyist cell.) Contemporary neoconservative thought bears the
marks of its Trotskyist origins in the style of its expression. The
essentially leftist utopianism of the neoconservative foreign policy
analysts is succinctly summarized by Boot in a single sentence:
"Many conservatives think, however, that 'realism' presents far too crabbed
a view of American power and responsibility. They suggest that we need to
promote our values, for the simple reason that liberal democracies rarely
fight one another, sponsor terrorism, or use weapons of mass destruction."
The old-fashioned conservative virtues of prudence, restraint, and humility
are too "crabbed" for the world-saving all-conquering neocon imagination.
Caution would cramp their style. These revolutionaries of the Right would
cast all caution aside, and instead move boldly to "promote our values"
just as Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao once moved with equal boldness to promote
their values: to establish a world order, a state or federation of states,
unified by adherence to a common ideology.
Communism was supposed to have been the only road to world peace: socialist
states, we were solemnly assured, would never go to war against each other.
When China disproved this by attacking not only Vietnam but also starting a
cold war against the Soviet Union, Communist theorists covered over this
giant hole in their theoretical edifice by declaring that either China or
the Soviets had gone "capitalist."
Like the commies of yesteryear, the neocons of today proclaim that the
triumph of their ideology, "democratic capitalism," will lead to the same
universal convergence of interests. But history refutes their panacea:
surely the American War of Independence, which pitted a parliamentary
monarchy against an emerging republic, is an important historical exception
to the rule that democracies "rarely" war on one another.
Like the "proletarian internationalists" of old, the democratic
internationalists of the post-9/11 world declare it is our moral duty to
impose our form of government on foreign peoples. Eerily echoing the
Communist mouthpieces of a bygone era, the pundits who push this
neo-imperialist nonsense explain away inconvenient facts as exceptions that
somehow prove the rule. The dead souls of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I fear,
would take vigorous exception to Boot's suggestion that their immolation is
a mere speck on the otherwise brilliant raiment of Democracy.
I note, in passing, the similarity of the rhetorical sleight-of-hand
practiced by commies and neocons alike: democratist ideologues, like their
communist alter-egos, do not claim their system is inherently pacific, but
only in relation to states of a similar orientation. This is supposed to
make us forget that democracy, unrestrained by customs and constitutions,
morals and the demands of commerce, is the most warlike ideology of them
all, as evidenced by the history of the U.S. since the era of Wilson, not
to mention the history of Athens, or that of the Roman republic.
Sometime around the late 1950s, American conservatives picked up a
hitch-hiker on the road to power who wound up hijacking their movement. The
thuggish style of the left with its organized smear campaigns,
race-baiting, expulsions, and enforced ideological conformity was imported
to the Right via the neconservative influx: the ugly viciousness of, say,
David Horowitz, didn't derive from a careful reading of Russell Kirk, but
from the intellectual hooliganism of the "New" Left (and its Old Left
progenitors). The running dogs of capitalism have merely been transformed
into the running dogs of "anti-Americanism."
MORE ON
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j010303.html
And do we have any log cabin libertarians here,I wonder? Some of you sound
like you suck on a little paleo log in the closet.Mongo? Hows the pussy?
