CHAPTER XIV: NETWORKS OF INTEREST
... no one can be called a good man who, in order to support himself, takes up a profession that obliges him at all times to be rapacious, fraudulent, and cruel, as of course must be all of those -- no matter what their rank -- who make a trade of war.
--Niccolo Machiavelli, The Art of war.
The neocons are an intensely ideological faction, and we are therefore on firm ground if we examine their ideology as a guide to their conduct. We must only remember that the neocons make a rigid separation between the elite truths that they tell each other -- their esoteric doctrine -- and the belief structure they offer for the edification of the masses -- the exoteric doctrine. The esoteric doctrine is often transmitted verbally, rather than by published writings. Still, the published writings allow us to see the basic neocon outlook clearly enough. What we find is an embrace of war, violence, hatred, coups, martial law, and, most important for our present purposes, terrorism.
The supreme neocon guru is Leo Strauss (1899-1973), who taught politics for many years at the University of Chicago, and later at St. John's of Annapolis. Strauss was a Marburg Kantian of the Herman Cohen school who did his doctorate with the irrationalist Ernst Cassirer. Strauss studied for two years with grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, which he procured with the help of the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt. Among Strauss's students were Alan Bloom, the author of the Closing of the American Mind, and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard. The Straussian-neocon network is now extensive, and stretches over three generations. Neocons are famous for helping one another up the career ladder, and for teaching courses based only on neocon texts. They are narrow-minded, sectarian, and essentially ignorant of philosophy and history. They are an ideological faction, often a fanatical faction. We are talking about Wolfowitz, Feith, Bolton, Luti, Schulsky, Scooter Libby, Cambone, Hadley and others who run the Bush administration. Neocons outside of government include Perle, Woolsey, Irving and William Kristol, Norman and John Podhoretz, Saul and Adam Bellow, and so forth. The older generation of neocons were often Trotskyist communists; they have retained Trotskyite theories like the notion of competing elites; the neocons see a battle between the liberal elite and themselves as central to the political process.
LEO STRAUSS'S NIHILIST REVOLUTION: AN APOLOGY FOR TERROR
At the heart of Leo Strauss's political thought is an open apology for terrorism. This idea is illuminated in Strauss's exchange of comments with Alexandre Kojeve, a neo-Hegelian official of the French finance ministry, in the 1950s. At the heart of this debate is the question of the universal and homogenous state, and how philosophers should react to its existence. The universal homogenous state means something like a world where war and underdevelopment have been eliminated, and in which leisure time and well-being are rising. For most people, the universal homogenous state would look like a world of peace, progress, and prosperity.
But for Strauss and Kojeve, peace, progress, and prosperity mean the end of history because they wipe out the higher human values, which depend upon politics, and thus upon war. (Implicit also is the idea that peace, progress, and prosperity are bad for oligarchical domination, a cause dear to Strauss and Kojeve.) Strauss sums it up thus: "This end of History would be most exhilarating, but for the fact that, according to Kojeve, it is the participation in bloody political struggles as well as in real work or, generally expressed, the negating action, which raises man above the brutes." (Strauss 208)
For Strauss and Kojeve, "unlimited technological progress and its accompaniment, which are indispensable conditions of the universal and homogeneous state, are destructive of humanity. It is perhaps possible to say that the universal and homogeneous state is fated to come. But it is certainly impossible to say that man can reasonably be satisfied with it." (Strauss 208) This view of technology is that of the Greek historian called the Old Oligarch (who did not like the long walls and the Athenian navy), and is certainly not that of Plato. For Strauss, Greek philosophy is a screen upon which he projects his own ignorant opinions.
Not caring about what Plato really thought, Strauss advances towards his terrible conclusion: "If the universal and homogeneous state is the goal of History, History is absolutely 'tragic. ' Its completion will reveal that the human problem, and hence in particular the problem of the relation of philosophy and politics, is insoluble." (Strauss 208)
In Strauss's view, the imminent coming of the universal homogeneous state means that all progress accomplished by mankind to date has been worthless: "For centuries and centuries men have unconsciously done nothing but work their way through infinite labors and struggles and agonies, yet ever again catching hope, toward the universal and homogeneous state, and as soon as they have arrived at the end of their journey, they realize that through arriving at it they have destroyed their humanity, and thus returned, as in a cycle, to the prehuman beginnings of History." (Strauss 209)
This raises the question of the violent revolt against the universal homogeneous state, which is what Strauss regards as inevitable and desirable: "Yet there is no reason for despair as long as human nature has not been conquered completely, i.e., as long as sun and man still generate man. There will always be men (andres) who will revolt against a state which is destructive of humanity or in which there is no longer a possibility of noble action or of great deeds." (Strauss 209)
When the real men revolt against too much peace, progress, and prosperity, what will be their program? Strauss: "They may be forced into a mere negation of the universal and homogeneous state, into a negation not enlightened by any positive goal, into a nihilistic negation. While perhaps doomed to failure, that nihilist revolution may be the only great and noble deed that is possible once the universal and homogeneous state has become inevitable. But no one can know whether it will fail or succeed. (Strauss 209, emphasis added)
What can be understood by nihilistic negation and nihilist revolution? In the nineteenth century, nihilism was an ideology of terrorism; the crazed bomb-throwers who assassinated statesmen and rulers across Europe and America (including President McKinley) were atheists, anarchists and nihilists. In the twentieth century, the nihilist revolution was synonymous with some of the most extreme factions of fascism and Nazis. "Long live death!" was a slogan of some of them. With these lines, Strauss has opened the door to fascism, murder, mayhem, war, genocide, and most emphatically to terrorism. And he is not shy about spelling this out.
LEO STRAUSS: BACK TO THE STONE AGE
What will the nihilist revolution look like? Strauss writes: "Someone may object that the successful revolt against the universal and homogeneous state could have no other effect than that the identical historical process which led from the primitive horde to the final state will be repeated." (Strauss 209, emphasis added) The primitive horde or primal horde refers to the human communities of the Paleolithic hunting and gathering societies, to the foragers and cave people of the Old Stone Age. Strauss is endorsing a nihilistic revolt that will have the effect of destroying as much as 10,000 years of progress in civilization, and in hurling humanity back to its wretched predicament in the Paleolithic. Here Strauss finds a momentary common ground with Rousseau, who also had a liking for the Paleolithic; here we are close to the ideas which animated the reign of terror in the French Revolution.
Strauss comes as a Job's comforter to those who have been thrown back into the Old Stone Age: "But would such a repetition of the process -- a new lease on life for man and humanity -- not be preferable to the indefinite continuation of the inhuman end? Do we not enjoy every spring although we know the cycle of the seasons, although we know that winter will come again?" (Strauss 209) Springtime for Leo Strauss has thus acquired the idiosyncratic meaning of a return to the horrors of the Old Stone Age.
Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood. This was what was to come, which you now experience in your life, and it is even more than that. (I had this vision on the night of 12 December 1913.)
-- The Red Book: Liber Novus, by C.G. Jung
Short of turning back the clock to the Paleolithic, Strauss sees one promising possibility latent in Kojeve's universal homogeneous state. This concerns the opportunity for political violence, yet another form of terrorism: "Kojeve does seem to leave an outlet for action in the universal and homogeneous state. In that state the risk of violent death is still involved in the struggle for political leadership .... But the opportunity for action can exist only for a tiny minority. And besides, is this not a hideous prospect: a state in which the last refuge of man's humanity is political assassination in the particularly sordid form of the palace revolution?" (Strauss 209) Such sporadic and limited violence is not enough for Strauss.
Marx and Engels had written about the realm of freedom which would result from higher stages of economic development in the form of a communist utopia. Strauss transforms their communist slogan into an invective against middle class progress and middle class values in general when he concludes this passage with the call: "Warriors and workers of all countries, unite, while there is still time, to prevent the coming of the 'realm of freedom.' Defend with might and main, if it needs to be defended, the 'realm of necessity."' (Strauss 209) Putting aside the superficial polemic against communist utopia, Strauss's goal here is to argue that peace, progress, and prosperity are destructive to oligarchy, and anything must be preferred to such an outcome.
Being An Answer To Mr. Burke's Attack On The French Revolution
Among the incivilities by which nations or individuals provoke and irritate each other, Mr. Burke's pamphlet on the French Revolution is an extraordinary instance. Neither the People of France, nor the National Assembly, were troubling themselves about the affairs of England, or the English Parliament; and that Mr. Burke should commence an unprovoked attack upon them, both in Parliament and in public, is a conduct that cannot be pardoned on the score of manners, nor justified on that of policy.
There is scarcely an epithet of abuse to be found in the English language, with which Mr. Burke has not loaded the French Nation and the National Assembly. Everything which rancour, prejudice, ignorance or knowledge could suggest, is poured forth in the copious fury of near four hundred pages. In the strain and on the plan Mr. Burke was writing, he might have written on to as many thousands. When the tongue or the pen is let loose in a frenzy of passion, it is the man, and not the subject, that becomes exhausted.
Hitherto Mr. Burke has been mistaken and disappointed in the opinions he had formed of the affairs of France; but such is the ingenuity of his hope, or the malignancy of his despair, that it furnishes him with new pretences to go on. There was a time when it was impossible to make Mr. Burke believe there would be any Revolution in France. His opinion then was, that the French had neither spirit to undertake it nor fortitude to support it; and now that there is one, he seeks an escape by condemning it.
Not sufficiently content with abusing the National Assembly, a great part of his work is taken up with abusing Dr. Price (one of the best-hearted men that lives) and the two societies in England known by the name of the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information.
Dr. Price had preached a sermon on the 4th of November, 1789, being the anniversary of what is called in England the Revolution, which took place 1688. Mr. Burke, speaking of this sermon, says: "The political Divine proceeds dogmatically to assert, that by the principles of the Revolution, the people of England have acquired three fundamental rights:
1. To choose our own governors.
2. To cashier them for misconduct.
3. To frame a government for ourselves."
Dr. Price does not say that the right to do these things exists in this or in that person, or in this or in that description of persons, but that it exists in the whole; that it is a right resident in the nation. Mr. Burke, on the contrary, denies that such a right exists in the nation, either in whole or in part, or that it exists anywhere; and, what is still more strange and marvellous, he says: "that the people of England utterly disclaim such a right, and that they will resist the practical assertion of it with their lives and fortunes." That men should take up arms and spend their lives and fortunes, not to maintain their rights, but to maintain they have not rights, is an entirely new species of discovery, and suited to the paradoxical genius of Mr. Burke.
-- Rights of Man, by Thomas Paine
Here we have a blanket endorsement of forms of violence and mayhem, including terrorism and war, in doses large enough to send world civilization back to the Stone Age. This implies genocide on a scale far beyond Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Today's world population is about 6.25 billion, and barely subsists on the basis of realized technological and industrial progress. But under hunting and gathering conditions, the demographic carrying capacity of the earth would be reduced to 25-50 million. If implemented today, Strauss's program for dismantling the universal homogeneous state would mean a genocide of something approaching 6 billion victims, two whole orders of magnitude beyond Hitler.
And even this must be put into perspective. Strauss notoriously feared to write what he really believed; the public could never face the full truth of his doctrines. Therefore, what we find written in On Tyranny is very likely a somewhat diluted view of his real views. So if Strauss lite, the exoteric version that he felt comfortable publishing at the height of his career, spells up to 6 billion victims, God save us from the full fury of Strauss's esoteric version as it may be transmitted among the neocons infesting and controlling the United States government under the Bush regime.
The most urgent anti-terrorist measure of them all would thus appear to be a purge of neocons from all branches of government (including the Carl Schmitt disciples Scalia, Rehnquist, and Thomas on the Supreme Court), and a general quarantine of neocons as what they really are, neo-fascists and neo-Nazis.
NEOCONS PREFER WAR TO PEACE
When Strauss talks about the universal and homogenous state, as we have seen, he is referring to something which the ordinary person might identify as peace, progress, and prosperity, with a good measure of equality and of international pacification. For most people, such a situation might seem to be almost ideal, but for the self-styled neocon intellectual, it represents the abolition of all human values and of everything that makes life worth living. The US Constitution mandates that the government pursue the General Welfare, but for the neocons this is anathema, since among other things it threatens their most cherished principle -- oligarchy. In particular, the neocons were not happy with the subsiding of the Cold War, and viewed the 1993 Oslo peace accords between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as well as the Good Friday agreement regarding Northern Ireland in 1998 -- which the world warmly welcomed -- with great consternation. These aspects of neocon thought are derived most prominently from the proto-fascist Nietzsche, but also from the card-carrying Nazis Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, and of course from their chief guru, the neo-fascist professor Leo Strauss. Since the neocon rejection of some of the greatest goods of civilization is likely to be incomprehensible to many readers, we need to pause to illustrate it.
In May 2004 the Washington Post carried an article by Corey Robin, assistant professor of political science at Brooklyn College in the City University of New York. Robin had carried out interviews with some well-known neocons and fellow travelers in the late summer of 2001, just before synthetic terrorism transformed the scene. Here we can sample the deep discontent and restless desire for conflict which prevailed among these circles at that time.
Robin heard from Irving Kristol, the father of William Kristol, the central figure of the warmongering Project for a New American Century, whose web site was vainly calling for full-scale war with Iraq during Clinton's second term. Kristol lamented that the US was too focused on economic prosperity, and was not sufficiently aggressive in the defense of its global hegemony. "It's too bad," complained Kristol. "I think it would be natural for the United States ... to play a far more dominant role in world affairs ... to command and give orders as to what is to be done. People need that. There are many parts of the world where an authority willing to use troops can make ... a healthy difference." Kristol reserved particular scorn for any concern about the health or well-being of the population in general, which he scorned as a matter for accountants. "I think it's disgusting that ... presidential politics of the most important country in the world should revolve around prescriptions for elderly people."
Robin found that the neocons prized "mystery and vitality over calculation and technology," and even over money and markets. Lewis I. "Scooter" Libby, one of the schemers who brought us the Iraq war, commented that "the cult of peace and prosperity found expression in President Clinton's weak and distracted foreign policy," which had made it easier for Bin Laden to run wild. Robin commented further: "Though conservatives reputedly favor wealth and prosperity, law and order, stability and routine, they disdained Clinton for his very pursuit of these virtues. His quest for affluence, they argued, produced a society that lost its depth and political meaning." And again: "Clinton's vision of a benign international order, conservatives argued, betrayed an unwillingness to take on a world of power and violence, of mysterious evil and unfathomable hatred. Coping with such a world requires pagan courage and barbaric virtue, qualities many conservatives embrace over the more prosaic goods of peace and prosperity."
The neocons, according to Robin, see 9/11 as an opportunity to exalt their "political virtues such as heroism and struggle" over "the numbing politics of affluence" because of their new-found ability to go to the public with "calls for sacrifice and destiny." The neocons were afflicted by a self-righteous and hypocritical megalomania: they fervently believed that the United States, with its $500 billion yearly trade deficit and its hollow army of ten divisions could "govern events -- and determine the outcome of history." Based on this evidence, it is fair to say that at the turn of the millennium, the neocon faction was searching for new opportunities for conflict and violence. When those opportunities arrived, the neocons rejoiced and rushed into their favorite enterprise of sending other people's children into useless wars. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004)
NEOCONS: CUCKOLDS OF MARS
Catholic traditionalist Patrick Buchanan showed some awareness of this same restlessness and desire for new conflicts among the neocons during the 1999-2000 presidential campaign, when he commented that he was alarmed by the clique around candidate G. W. Bush -- a reference to the neocon group that pretentiously and ignorantly called itself the "Vulcans." In a speech about foreign policy, Buchanan noted that he had worked with some of these neocons in previous administrations, and that he now found them consumed by nostalgia for the Cold War, and therefore very likely to pursue "conflict," "intervention," "confrontation," and "bullying." Buchanan ridiculed the "little magazines" of the neocon cabal, where they had been developing their concept of the US as a "benevolent global hegemon" -- a role which many other states could be counted upon to reject. Buchanan added that, while the Clinton crowd had at least been canny enough to pick fights with smaller powers like Serbia, the Bush clique was determined to promote confrontation with larger powers who had the capability of inflicting great harm on the United States. The great exemplar of all these trends, said Buchanan, was Wolfowitz, who at that time thought he was on the way to being secretary of state.
Vulcan, or Hephaestos, was of course the Graeco-Roman god of volcanoes, fire, and the smithy. He was married to Venus, but she betrayed him in favor of Mars, the god of war. So Vulcan was a cuckold of Mars, as our ignorant and pretentious Vulcans seem to have forgotten. But Mars has come back to make them cuckolds too, in Iraq and shortly in Afghanistan as well.
David Brooks had written in Newsweek that, during the 1990s, Americans had "renovated our kitchens, refurbished our home entertainment systems, invested in patio furniture, jacuzzis, and gas grills." Leaving aside the arid banality of Brooks' class-distorted view of the world, we must recall that for most Americans there was no peace dividend worth mentioning at the end of the Cold War. (Washington Post, May 2, 2004) And the pre-9/11 world was in reality no idyll, but rather a world of growing financial breakdown and military tension, as we have shown elsewhere in this book.
The passing of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology of world historical significance. For a while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang, or Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing "Common Marketization" of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.
This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. For the world at that point would be divided between a part that was historical and a part that was post historical. Conflict between states still in history, and between those states and those at the end of history, would still be possible. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post historical world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history, and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.
-- The End of History?, by Francis Fukuyama
CARL SCHMITT: POISON GAS ON GERMAN CITIES
Leo Strauss was the product of three main intellectual and political influences. First among these was the proto-Nazi Friedrich Nietzsche, who was designated by Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg as one of the four precursors of Hitlerism (the others were the operatic composer Richard Wagner, the anti-Semitic LaGarde, and the racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain). A second was the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger, who praised Hitler in his inaugural speech as rector of the University of Freiburg. Finally, there is the card-carrying Nazi Cart Schmitt, the main legal theorist of the Third Reich.
Schmitt's ideas have directly contributed to the shattering of the US political consensus under the Bush regime. For Schmitt, politics comes down to the distinction between friend and foe. Starting from this extremely meager reduction of human motivation, he goes on to equate politics with warfare: if there is no warfare or conflict, then politics is dead, and life is no longer worth living. Schmitt therefore wants politics to be the monopoly of a strong state, and he does not like the idea that the state or the government could be influenced by the citizens. Schmitt's thought is thus revealed as authoritarian, dictatorial, fascistic. It is from Schmitt that Samuel Huntington got his idea that an enemy image is absolutely necessary for the cohesion of any society. In reality, however, it is primarily an oligarchical society which requires an enemy image, because that society is based on an irrational principle of domination which cannot stand the kind of scrutiny it would receive in peacetime.George Orwell understood this aspect well when he suggested in 1984 that the endless war among Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia was really a war waged by each of these states against its own population, for the purpose of perpetuating a hierarchical society.
The card-carrying Nazi Schmitt was also a bitter opponent, not just of the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, but of international law and international treaties in general. Like his neocon descendants of today, he was an ardent unilateralist. Here are some of Schmitt's typical comments about international law: "We are talking again about basic rights, about the basic rights of peoples and of states, and especially about the basic rights of those states who have, mindful of their own race, gotten themselves into the proper domestic order. Such a state is the national socialist state, which has led the German people back to an awareness of itself and its race. We proceed from the most self-evident of all basic rights, the right to one's own existence. This is an inalienable, eternal basic right, in which the right to self-determination, self-defense, and to the means of self-defense is included ... From our solid standpoint we can see through that world of legalistic argumentation and that huge apparatus of treaties and pacts, and assign this tower of Babel to its rightful place in the history of international law."
Schmitt was the author of Article 48 of the 1919 Constitution of the Weimar Republic, which was the clause that allowed the Reich President to declare an emergency or state of siege and thereafter rule by decree. Schmitt's activity during the 1920s was largely devoted to agitating in favor of the dissolution or marginalization of the Reichstag (parliament) and the institution of a dictatorship of the President of the Reich. One of Schmitt's favorite sayings was that sovereignty meant the ability to declare a state of emergency. If you can find what organ of government has the ability to call out the state of siege, suspend the legislature, and impose martial law, Schmitt reasoned, you have found the place where sovereignty is actually located.
For Schmitt, the concept of emergency rule is a totally lawless realm; under it, the ruling authority can do literally anything it wants, without regard to law, separation of powers, constitutional freedoms, equity, or anything else. In one of his essays Schmitt approvingly quotes a speech by the Reich Justice Minister Schiffer to the Reichstag on March 3, 1920, in which Schiffer points out that under Article 48, the Reich President can attack "German cities with poison gas, if that is, in the concrete case, the necessary measure for the re-establishment of law and order." (Schmitt, Die Diktatur, 201) Schmitt was adamant that the emergency provisions of the Weimar constitution were theoretically and practically unlimited, and could be used to justify the greatest imaginable atrocities. We see here a tradition of thought, alive in the Schmittian-Straussian neocons of today, which would have no trouble in accommodating a crime on the scope of 9/11.
In July, 1932 the Nazis and their allies carried out a cold coup against the minority Social Democratic caretaker government in Prussia, the largest political subdivision of Germany. The pro-Nazi government in Prussia then became the springboard for Hitler's seizure of power via a legal coup in January 1933. Carl Schmitt was the lawyer for the coup forces in the German supreme court in Leipzig. (The parallels of this action to the Schwarzenegger/Warren Buffet oligarchical coup in California in 2003 are more than suggestive, since California is the largest US political subdivision in the same way that Prussia was in Germany.) Schmitt also provided legal services for Hitler's seizure of power in January, 1933.
Carl Schmitt wrote articles for the gutter-level anti-Semitic tabloid Der Sturmer, edited by Julius Streicher. In 1934, when Hitler massacred the brown-shirted SA leader Ernst Rohm and his faction for supporting a second revolution against the financiers, industrialists, and the army, Schmitt quickly emerged as one of Hitler's most shameless apologists. In his scurrilous pamphlet, "Der Fuhrer Schutz das Recht" ("The Fuhrer defends the law"), Schmitt endorsed the Byzantine theory according to which law is a successful act of strength by the stronger party against the weaker. Schmitt wrote that the primary task of the Fuehrer was "to distinguish friend from enemy ... The Fuhrer takes the warnings of German history seriously. That gives him the right and the power to found a new state and a new order ... The Fuhrer protects the law from the worst abuse, when he -- in the moment of danger -- through the power of his leadership as supreme judge, directly creates law. His role as supreme judge flows from his role as supreme leader. Anyone who wants to separate one of these from the other is trying to unhinge the state with the help of the justice system .... the Fuhrer himself determines the content and scope of a crime." (Schmitt 200) This opens the door to every arbitrary outrage under color of law. While these ideas, so dear to today's ruling neocons, have been applied to Abu Ghraib, it is also clear that they are equally applicable to 9/11.
STRAUSS AND NIETZSCHE
As a young man, Strauss was an enthusiastic devotee of Nietzsche. Strauss wrote: "I can only say that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched me between my 22nd and 30th years, that I literally believed everything that I understood of him ..."(Strauss to Karl Lowith, 23 June 1935, in Strauss, Leo and Karl Lowith, "Correspondence," Independent Journal of Philosophy, vol. 516, 1988, pp. 177-192.) For the young Strauss, Nietzsche was an idol, and the main vehicle of his youthful protests: "... the young Strauss, after a day of reading at the Prussian State Library, would go to a cafe on Unter den Linden and pronounce the name 'Nietzsche' loud enough to be heard at the other tables." (See Leo Strauss, "An Unspoken Prologue to a Public Lecture at St. John's," Interpretation, vol. 7, no. 31-2; cited by Michael Platt in Kenneth L. Deutsch and Walter Soffer eds., The Crisis of Liberal Democracy: A Straussian Perspective [Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1987], 23.) According to Straussian scholars, "In Nietzsche, Strauss certainly discovered the immoderation of philosophy, but in Nietzsche, especially the late Nietzsche, he also met the love of his life." (Deutsch and Soffer, 23)
As the neocons never tire of reminding us, ideas have consequences. If Strauss is based to such an extraordinary degree on Nietzsche, then we may be permitted to take a minute to see which Nietzsche it was that Strauss admired so much. The guess here is that it was Nietzsche as the glorifier of hierarchy, slavery, violence, war, and terrorism. In some of the notes that Nietzsche made during the time he was writing his Genealogy of Morals, we read: "Which way? We need a new terrorism." ("Das Problem wohin? Es bedarf eines neuen Terrorismus.") (Nietzsche vol. XIV, p. 334, emphasis added.)
Or, in the section of Ecce Homo entitled "Why I am a fate," we find the following: "I know my fate. My name will be linked someday to the memory of something monstrous -- to a crisis whose like never existed on earth, to the deepest clash of conscience, to a decision conjured up against everything which had been believed, promoted, held sacred up to then. I am not a man, I am dynamite." ("Ich kenne mein Los. Es wird sich einmal an meinem Namen die Erinnerung an etwas Ungeheures AnknUpfen, -an eine Krisis, wie es keine aufErden gab, an die tiefste Gewissens- ollision, an eine Entscheidung, heraufbeschworen gegen alles, was bis dahin geglaubt, gefordert, geheiligt worden war. Ich bin kein Mensch, ich bin Dynamit.") (Nietzsche vol. VII p. 317, emphasis added.) This passage was a favorite of the German neocon Armin Mohler, the author of the Conservative Revolution in Germany, 1918-1932.
Nietzsche was full of contempt and hatred for the middle class, family life, and the quest for economic security, which he always saw in connection with the inferior "last men." Nietzsche is the great glorifier of war, conflict, violence, and cruelty, which he regards not just as unavoidable but also as positive goods: "We think that hardness, forcefulness, slavery, danger in the alley and the heart, life in hiding, stoicism, the art of experiment and deviltry of every kind, that everything evil, terrible, tyrannical in man, everything in him that is kin to beasts of prey and serpents, serves the enhancement of the species 'man' as much as its opposite does." (Beyond Good and Evil 54-55) It is from Nietzsche that today's neocons derive their endless fascination with warfare and bloodshed: "You should always be such men as are always looking for an enemy -- for your enemy. And with some of you there is hate at first sight. You should seek your enemy and wage your war -- a war for your opinions. ... You should love peace as a means to new wars. And the short peace more than the long. I do not exhort you to work but to battle. I do not exhort you to peace, but to victory. May your work be a battle, may your peace be a victory! ... You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I tell you: it is the good war that hallows every cause. War and courage have done more great things than charity .... Are you ugly? Very well, my brothers! Take the sublime about you, the mantle of the ugly." (Zarathustra 74)
Bush's supporters among the Christian fundamentalists and Christian Zionists would perhaps be surprised to know what neocons (to whom Bush has turned over the government) think about Christ and Christianity. Nietzsche referred to Christ as an "idiot," (Twilight of the Idols/The Antichrist 202). In addition to his famous proposition that God is dead, Nietzsche also proclaimed a special role for himself: "I am ... the Anti-Christ" (Ecce Homo III 2) Nietzsche, like Strauss after him, was an exponent of European atheist nihilism, and this remains the underlying -- esoteric -- outlook of the neocons who are ruling the US. At one point Nietzsche asks himself, "What does nihilism mean?" His answer "That the highest values are devalued. The goal is missing: the answer to 'why?' is missing." (Lukacs, Von Nietzsche zu Hitler [Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1966], 69) If God is dead, all crimes are allowed.
Thus the neocon publicist Robert Kaplan, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force, wrote in his recent Warrior Politics that a pagan ethos of war and cruelty is necessary to face the great crises of this age. For Kaplan, the philosophical and social content of Christianity is a great obstacle to inculcating the proper attitude in the US ruling class. Among other things, Kaplan finds that the Roman Emperor Tiberius (under whose rule the crucifixion of Christ took place) has been treated unfairly by historians, and deserves to be rehabilitated. Similarly, one of neocon Paul Wolfowitz's favorite quips is reportedly the infamous "Oderint dum metuant" -- let them hate me, as long as they fear me -- a line from the Latin writer Accius later popularized by the infamous Emperor Caligula.
Strauss is well aware that Nietzsche is a genocidalist, but this does not disturb his admiration for the sage of Turin. As Strauss wrote in What is Political Philosophy (1959): "Being certain of the tameness of modern western man, [Nietzsche] preached the sacred right of 'merciless extinction' of large masses of men. He used much of his unsurpassable and inexhaustible power of passionate and fascinating speech for making his readers loathe, not only socialism and communism, but conservatism, nationalism, and democracy as well. After having taken upon himself this great political responsibility, he could not show his readers a way to political responsibility. [I.e., he could not seize power, WGT] He left them no choice except that between irresponsible indifference to politics and irresponsible political options. He thus prepared a regime which, as long as it lasted, made discredited democracy look again like a golden age. He tried to articulate his understanding both of the modern situation and of human life as such by his doctrine of the will to power." In other words, Strauss knows very well that Nietzsche was a precursor of Hitler, but supports him anyway as a philosopher for today.
A storm cellar for neocons and failed pols in the Rumsfeld Pentagon has been the Defense Policy Board, Chaired by Richard Perle, the virulent neocon warmonger whom British Labour Party Foreign Secretary Dennis Healey dubbed the "prince of darkness" back in the 1980s. On September 19, 2001, Perle used the Defense Policy Board as the springboard for the neocon war drive against Iraq that produced an unprovoked and aggressive war in March 2003. Other members of the Defense Policy Board included: Henry Kissinger, George Shultz, Helmut Sonnenfeldt, Fred Ikle, James Schlesinger, Dan Quayle, Harold Brown, James Woolsey, and Newt Gingrich. Perle was eventually forced to resign, in part because of corruption charges against him stemming from Trireme Corp, and his relation with Hollinger Corp. boss Lord Conrad Black. This board of unelected and unaccountable extremist ideologues, known as the Wolfowitz cabal, needs to be urgently and permanently dissolved.
In a 19-hour meeting on September 19-20, 2001 Perle, Newt Gingrich, James Woolsey, and Wolfowitz pushed hard for an immediate operation against Iraq. Wolfowitz's plan was to have the U.S. take over southern Iraq militarily as an opposition beachhead and use the Basra oil revenues to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Perle wanted Saddam Hussein's "regime ...overthrown quickly with military force." This was too much for Powell, at least in that phase. (October 12, 2001)