I wrote the following editorial over a decade ago, but in light of current events - NSA spying, torture memo, renewed war, wacky Supreme Court decisions, corporate largess vs public neglect, one crisis after another - sadly, it seems relevant as ever.
Forewarned is forearmed.
Perhaps like me, some of you have been puzzling over the motivations and agenda of the Bush Administration [2014 Update: now the Conservative agenda in general]. What is it – greed?, power?, oil?, fundamentalist religious ideology? empire-building?, delusions of grandeur?, pandering to corporate special-interests?, petty vindictiveness?, mere “I was here” vandalism? Though troubled, I used to console myself that such people were ultimately kind of stupid, and would eventually hang themselves. So it was even more unsettling to learn that, no, in fact there is a sort of evil genius behind the agenda.
In a recent [2014: now decades old] Washington Post interview, Thomas Friedman remarked: “You know, within a 5-block radius, there are 25 people who, if you’d exiled them to a desert island a year ago, the Iraqi war never would have happened.” A common factor among these people is that many were students and disciples of Leo Strauss, a political science professor at University of Chicago in the 1950s-60s. Early as 1987, such people were enough of a force that Newsweek ran an article “The Cult of Leo Strauss” which posed the question “why are there so many Straussians in the Reagan Administration?”. Since then, they were apparently the architects of Newt Gingrich’s Contract on America and the more recent Project for a New American Century.
Excerpts from a brief Strauss bio that ran in Sep/Oct 2003 Adbusters magazine:
The Straussians, observed historian Gordon S. Wood in the New York Review of Books the following year [1988], are the biggest phenomenon in 20th-Century academia. His ideas emerge from his life experience. Strauss fled Nazi Germany for the safety of America in 1937, and blamed not fascism but the Weimar Republic’s LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC IDEALS [my emphasis] for permitting the rise of Nazism. A classicist, he taught the works of Plato, Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Hobbes, instructing his students to look for secret “codes” in the texts. Truth, he believed, was the preserve of an elite few who might have to tell “noble lies” – an idea he lifted from Plato – to the uncomprehending masses.
Are political entities, asked the charismatic Strauss, “not compelled to use force and fraud … if they are to prosper?”
“Weapons of mass destruction” would be a noble lie,” says Shadia Drury, a scholar who has written two books on Strauss…
Strauss believed that democracy, however flawed, was best defended by an ignorant public, pumped up on nationalism and religion. Only a militantly nationalist state could deter human aggression, and since most people were naturally self-absorbed and hedonistic, Strauss believed that the only way to transform them was to make them love their nation enough to die for it. Such nationalism requires and external threat – and if one cannot be found, it must be manufactured.”
A few more key items from www.disinfopedia.org :
“…Strauss was neither a liberal nor a democrat. Perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical (in Strauss’s view) because they need to be led, and they need strong leaders to tell them what’s good for them…”
“Strauss believed that good statesmen have powers of judgement and must rely on an inner circle. THE PERSON WHO WHISPERS IN THE EAR OF THE KING IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE KING.” [my emphasis].
“Another Strauss critic … put the Straussian’s position this way: “They believe that your enemy is deceiving you, and you have to pretend to agree, but secretly you follow your own views.” In effect, there is no integrity to diplomacy whatsoever – states engage in discussion only to deceive, and “the enemy” is defined not by the situation, but known in advance, and not amenable to change.”
"Noble lies", "uncomprehending masses", "force and fraud", "nationalism and religion", "perpetual deception"? Is the hair beginning to stand on the back of your neck? In my brief Internet research, Straussians include: Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky (took PhDs under Strauss), Richard Perle, Cheney Chief of Staff Lewis Libby, Elliot Abrams, White House bio-ethics advisor Francis Fukuyama, John Ashcroft, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Alan Keyes, William Bennett, William Kristol, Alan Bloom, John Agresto, New York Post editor John Podhoretz, and Pentagon, State Department and NSC advisor Michael Ledeen (whose recommendations on the Middle East will curl you hair – see: … well, it’s short – I’ll just copy it):
[quoting bio in Wikipedia.org:] Iran, Iraq, and Syria are the first and foremost nations where this should happen [export of democratic revolution], according to Ledeen, and it should be achieved violently, by what he terms “total war”, which he defines as follows:
“Total war not only destroys the enemy’s military forces, but also brings the enemy society to an extremely personal point of decision, so that they are willing to accept a reversal of the cultural trends … The sparing of civilian lives cannot be the total war’s first priority. … The purpose of total war is to permanently force your will onto another people.” [end quote]
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2014 Update:
Sadly, a decade later, the reach and influence of the above philosophy seems alive and well, being reflected in the ongoing efforts to “manage” the public through lies, fear, hatred, division, deception, secrecy, distraction, diversion, chronic war, foreign bogeymen, and one manufactured crisis after another (what ever happened with all the “we’re all gonna die!” Ebola hysteria anyway?).
This kind of leadership makes anarchy seem appealing - though perhaps that’s the point: make governance ineffective so the rich and the powerful can then have free reign.
Certainly we can do better as an enlightened, progressive, compassionate society. But the first step is to see clearly why we are in our current plight.