The CIA infiltrating the Left?

The CIA infiltrating the Left? Peter Myers, January 15, 2003; update May 24, 2007. My comments are shown {thus}; write to me at contact.html.
You are at http://mailstar.net/cia-infiltrating-left.html.
(1) Robert Fulford's column about the CIA's covert cultural sponsorship (2) 'The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', by Frances Stonor Saunders (3) Carroll Quigley on Walter Lippman (4) Walter Lippmann and the Mont Pelerin Society (5) Marxist Anti-Communism (6) Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution (7) Max Shpak on The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism" (8) Mick Hume unmasked as a Neo-Con (9) Robert Manne unmasked as a Neocon (10) Karl A. Wittfogel and the Frankfurt School: Neocons (11) Convergence between the USSR and the West (12) Another Jewish Communist comes out as a Neocon ... in the Murdoch press (13) A Trotskyist Website Responds (14) Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House (15) Michael Lind vs Alan Wald on the Trotskyist tie to the Neocons (16) Noam Chomsky and the Trots as Gatekeepers for the Jewish lobbies (15) William Pfaff: The philosophers of chaos reap a whirlwind (16) Neocons - meet the 'Marxist Right', by Justin Raimondo (17) Richard Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing
The Communist movement was irretrievably split by the Trotsky/Stalin divide. Jewish communists, over time, moved increasingly to the Trotsky camp, with its ambivalence about the Soviet Union. At first they were inclined to preserve it - hopefully with Trotsky back at the helm. Later they turned against it. Some co-operated with the CIA, and the CIA used them to drive a fatal wedge into the Communist camp.
While Stalin's murder of Trotsky is widely publicised, Stalin's own murder is hushed up - probably because it happened within two months' of the Doctors' Plot being announced, which suggests that Stalin was right about the plotters: death-of-stalin.html.
After Stalin's murder, the Soviet Union turned "revisionist", and - under Beria and Gorbachev - oriented to "convergence" with the West (see convergence.html), but Mao remained pro-Stalin. This was a substantial contributor to the Sino-Soviet split.
Communism has "fallen", yet it seems to reign in our universities and courts. Open Borders, Gay Marriage, Political Correctness ... these are the signs. The secret: what has fallen is Stalinism; that's all.
Trotsky's backers have not gone away. Many, "coming out" as Zionists, are now "Neocons".
And the New Left is largely Trotskyist in inspiration. The Frankfurt School (devoted to Marx and Freud; opposed to Stalin as much as Hitler) has had a great impact. And perceptions of the Left have been largely shaped by Isaac Deutscher, a Jewish Trotskyist: deutscher.html.
Despite New Left intellectuals' thinking of themselves as oppositionist "outsiders", Deutscher's material was published by such establishment bodies as The Economist and the BBC. The winners of the Deutscher Prize are announced in the London Review of Books, and the Deutscher Memorial Lecture is presented at the London School of Economics. Isaac Deutscher's central role in New Left Review: new-left.html.
(1) Robert Fulford's column about the CIA's covert cultural sponsorship (The National Post, April 25, 2000)
http://www.robertfulford.com/CIA.html.
... It began in the early years of the Cold War, when many European intellectuals admired the Soviet Union more than the United States. In Paris, even in Stalinist days, it was considered eccentric to be passionately anti-communist; if you were also pro-American, you were considered an outright loon. In England, things weren't all that different. A soon-to-be-famous journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, said that the New Statesman magazine had somehow established "the proposition that to be intelligent is to be Left, whereas almost the exact opposite is true."
Muggeridge urged the Americans to get into high-level propaganda. ...
The intellectuals who turned up at CIA-sponsored conferences and appeared in CIA-sponsored magazines were usually democratic socialists. That could never have been explained to Senator Joseph McCarthyand his sympathizers. But the CIA, its budget a black hole, was the one agency that never had to explain anything.
Eventually, a member of Congress began to expose the program. In 1964 Congressman Wright Patman, analyzing tax-free foundations, discovered that some were mainly mail drops. Journalists finally picked up on this a couple of years later, and by 1967 the secret was out. In the 1970s the CIA abandoned culture entirely (so far as we know). Melvin J. Lasky, who had started the whole program in 1950 and co-edited Encounter from 1958, kept the magazine flickeringly alive till 1991. When it died, hardly anyone mourned; the real Encounter had been gone a long time.
The story is still not entirely known (the CIA seldom obeys the Freedom of Information Act) but over the years it has emerged slowly from the shadows.
The most thorough history has recently appeared: Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War (Granta), by Frances Stonor Saunders. Aside from offering a vigorously researched account of these remarkable events, she delivers great lashings of gossip, some of which may fall into the too-good-to-be-true category. She tells us, for instance, that the CIA acquired the right to make George Orwell's Animal Farm into a film by promising his widow an introduction to Clark Gable. ...
(2) 'The CIA and the Cultural Cold War', by Frances Stonor Saunders
MONTHLY REVIEW Volume 51, Number 6 November 1999 www.monthlyreview.org The CIA and the Cultural Cold War Revisited by James Petras
Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War by Frances Stonor Saunders, (London: Granta Books), £20.
This book provides a detailed account of the ways in which the CIA penetrated and influenced a vast array of cultural organizations, through its front groups and via friendly philanthropic organizations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. The author, Frances Stonor Saunders, details how and why the CIA ran cultural congresses, mounted exhibits, and organized concerts. The CIA also published and translated well-known authors who toed the Washington line, sponsored abstract art to counteract art with any social content and, throughout the world, subsidized journals that criticized Marxism, communism, and revolutionary politics and apologized for, or ignored, violent and destructive imperialist U.S. policies. The CIA was able to harness some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West in service of these policies, to the extent that some intellectuals were directly on the CIA payroll. Many were knowingly involved with CIA « projects, » and others drifted in and out of its orbit, claiming ignorance of the CIA connection after their CIA sponsors were publiclyexposed during the late 1960s and the Vietnam war, after the turn of the political tide to the left.
U.S. and European anticommunist publications receiving direct or indirect funding included Partisan Review, Kenyon Review, New Leader, Encounter and many others. Among the intellectuals who were funded and promoted by the CIA were Irving Kristol, Melvin Lasky, Isaiah Berlin, Stephen Spender, Sidney Hook, Daniel Bell, Dwight MacDonald, Robert Lowell, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, and numerous others in the United States and Europe. In Europe, the CIA was particularly interested in and promoted the « Democratic Left » and ex-leftists, including Ignacio Silone, Stephen Spender, Arthur Koestler, Raymond Aron, Anthony Crosland, Michael Josselson, and George Orwell {end}
More at http://www.monthlyreview.org/1199petr.htm.
(3) Carroll Quigley on Walter Lippman:
Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in our Time, Macmillan New York 1966
{p. 938} More than fifty years ago the Morgan firm decided to infiltrate the Left-wing political movements in the United States. This was relatively easy to do, since these groups were starved for funds and eager for a voice to reach the people. Wall Street supplied both. The purpose was not to destroy, dominate, or take over but was really threefold: (1) to keep informed about the thinking of Left-wing or liberal groups; (2) to provide them with a mouthpiece so that they could "blow off steam," and (3) to have a final veto on their publicity and possibly on their actions, if they ever went "radical." There was nothing really new about this decision, since other financiers had talked about it and even attempted it earlier. What made it decisively important this time was the combination of its adoption by the dominant Wall Street financier, at a time when tax policy was driving all financiers to seek tax-exempt refuges for their fortunes, and at a time when the ultimate in Left-wing radicalism was about to appear under the banner of the Third International.
The best example of this alliance of Wall Street and Left-wing publication was The New Republic, a magazine founded by Willard Straight, using Payne Whitney money, in 1914. Straight ... became a Morgan partner ... He married Dorothy Payne Whitney ... the sister and co-heiress of Oliver
{p. 939} Payne, of the Standard Oil "trust." ...
The New Republic was founded by Willard and Dorothy Straight, using her money, in 1914, and continued to be supported by her financial contributions until March 23, 1953. The original purpose for establishing the paper was to provide an outlet for the progressive Left and to guide it quietly in an Anglophile direction. This latter task was entrusted to a young man, only four years out of Harvard, but already a member of the mysterious Round Table group, which has played a major role in directing England's foreign policy since its formal establishment in 1909. This new recruit, Walter Lippmann, has been, from 1914 to the present, the authentic spokesman in American journalism for the Establishments on both sides of the Atlantic in international affairs. His biweekly columns, which appear in hundreds of American papers, are copyrighted by the New York Herald Tribune which is now owned by J. H. Whitney. It was these connections, as a link between Wall Street and the Round Table Group, which gave Lippmann the opportunity in 1918, while still in his twenties, to be the official interpreter of the meaning of Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to the British government. {end}
More at tragedy.html.
Walter Lippmann for World Government: wells-lenin-league.html.
Walter Lippmann on Wilson and House: lippmann.html.
(4) Walter Lippmann and the Mont Pelerin Society
Richard Cockett, Thinking the Unthinkable: Think-Tanks and the Economic Counter-Revolution, HarperCollinsPublishers, London 1995.
In 1920, Lippmann lampooned "the Red hysteria" in his article An Early Estimate of Mr. McAdoo: lippmann.html. But in the wake of Stalin's defeat of Trotskyism, he came to the support of Liberalism.
{p. 9} Keynes and the Crisis of Liberalism, 1931-1939
From the 26th to the 30th of August 1938, but one month before the Munich conference which seemed to bring the triumph of totalitarianism in Europe an important step closer, an obscure conference took place in Paristo discuss what its participants called the 'crisis of liberalism' in Europe. The conference was convened and organized by a French academic, Professor Louis Rougier, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Besancon, and held at the Institut International de Cooperation Intellectuelle. The twenty-six who attended the Conference were all academics, with one notable exception, the American columnist Walter Lippmann. Indeed,the gathering was named in his honour 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' in an attempt by Rougier to unite the disputatious academics around the central importance of Lippmann's book The Good Society, published in 1937. For Rougier, Lippmann's book was, simply, 'la meilleure explication des maux de notre temps'. 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' was, naturally, dominated by Frenchmen; their number included the prominent political philosopher Raymond Aron, and the economist Jacques Rueff. Amongst the other Europeans were two Austrians of particular significance - Friedrich von Hayek, then a lecturer at the London School of Economics, and his mentor and teacher Ludwig von Mises, then resident in Geneva at the Graduate Institute of International Studies. Also from Geneva came another exiled central European economist, Wilhem Ropke, later architect of Germany's post-war Social Market Economy. They were all drawn to Paris by a shared concern at the apparently inexorable decline of liberalism in Europe. 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' represented the first coherent attempt to analyse the reasons for that decline and to suggest ways in which that decline might be reversed.
Lippmann's The Good Society was but one of a number of books published during the mid-1930s which warned of the seemingly
{p. 10} unstoppable advance of 'collectivist' ideologies and governments throughout the world since the end of the First World War. Lippmann himself acknowledged the contributions of two of the academics at the Paris Conference - Hayek and von Mises - to the intellectual development of this theme at the beginning of his own book. The first chapter of The Good Society described the contemporary situation in stark terms, describing 'Collectivism' as 'the dominant dogma of the Age':
{quote} Throughout the world, in the name of progress, men who call themselves Communists, Socialists, fascists, nationalists, progressives, and even liberals, are unanimous in holding that government with its instruments of coercion must, by commanding the people how they shall live, direct the course of civilization and fix the shape of things to come ... [so] Universal is the dominion of this dogma over the minds of contemporary men that no one is taken seriously as a statesman or a theorist who does not come forward with proposals to magnify the power of public officials and to extend and to multiply their intervention in human affairs. Unless he is authoritarian and collectivist, he is a mossback, a reactionary, at best an amiable eccentric swimming hopelessly against the tide. It is a strong tide. {endquote}
In what was then a comparatively novel intellectual formulation, anticipating George Orwell by almost a decade, Lippmann identified the two most powerful ideologies of the age, Fascism and Communism, as being no more than similarly extreme versions of the same collectivist impulse. Furthermore, collectivism could also be seen as an increasingly important ideology in countries which were supposedly opposed to those very extremist collectivisms, such as the United States of America (then in the throes of the collectivist 'New Deal') and Great Britain (where the virtues of Keynesian ideas about governmental intervention in the economy were being proclaimed to an increasingly sympathetic audience). The philosophy of individual freedom - classical liberalism - was, according to Lippmann, all but dead, and had been supplanted by collectivism. For Lippmann, the 'liberal philosophy' had stagnated during the mid-nineteenth century, when it had become 'frozen in its own errors', a 'great tradition that [had] become softened
{p. 11} by easy living ...' Only with the failure of liberalism as a coherent progressive philosophy was it conceivable that men 'should be tempted to regard the primitive tyrannies in Russia, Italy or Germany as the beginnings of a better life for mankind ...' Lippmann, like his fellow participants at the Paris conference, might acknowledge that collectivism was indeed the new intellectual orthodoxy, but to him this was 'little short of a disaster in human affairs'. In his opening remarks to the published proceedings of Le Colloque Walter Lippmann on 26 August 1938 Professor Rougier spoke of the evils of Communism, which after the Stalinist purges of the army and bureaucracy from 1936 to 1938 were especially evident in the West, but also argued that those people who thought there was some 'middle way' between the extreme of Fascist/Communist collectivism and the pure theoretical individualism of classical liberalism were labouring under the most dangerous illusion of all:
{quote} Le drame moral de notre epoque, c'est, des lors, I'aveugle- ment des hommes de gauche qui revent d'une democratie politique et d'une planisme economique, sans comprendre que le planisme economique implique l'Etat totalitaire et qui un socialisme liberal est un contradition dans les termes. Le drame moral de notre epoque, c'est l'aveuglement des hommes de droite qui soupirent d'admiration devant les gouvernements totalitaires, tout en revendiquant les avantages d'une economie capitaliste, sans se rendre compte que l'Etat totalitaire devore la fortune privee, met au pas et bureaucratise toutes les formes de l'activite economique d un pays. {endquote}
In a long paper on 'The Urgent Necessity of Re-orientation of Social Science' written for the Conference, Ropke and Rustow argued against thinking that there was any easy solution to the manifest economic dislocation and unemployment of the l930s, and that any attempt to solve these problems by 'monetary tricks and public works will only end in disaster, or to be more specific, in the totalitarian state, where all policy of giving coherence to society without giving it inherent and spontaneous stability must inevitably end'. All the participants in the conference agreed that liberalism as a coherent philosophy was at its lowest ebb, discredited and neglected, tarred with the brush of
{p. 12} Dickensian, Manchester School laissez-faire, just as they all agreed that the future of liberalism, as Rustow and Ropke understood it 'in the widest sense of anti-totalitarianism', depended on people like themselves. They wanted to develop a new, revitalized interpretation of liberalism: 'the combination of a working competition not only with the corresponding legal and institutional framework but also with a re-integrated Society of freely co-operating and vitally satisfied men is the only alternative to laissez-faire and to totalitarianism which we have to offer'. In his closing address, Rugier outlined various areas where liberalism thus needed to be re-examined, and he proposed to set up the 'Centre International d'Etudes pour la renovation du Liberalisme' for this purpose. The proceedings of the conference were published as 'Le Compte-Rendu des seances du Colloque Walter Lippmann', which Rougier rather grandly called the 'Magna Carta of Liberalism', and the twenty-six academics, intellectuals, journalists and others returned to their own countries at the beginning of September, withLippmann, Hayek and Ropke charged with founding American, British and Swiss sections of the new organization.
However, it was, of course, an inauspicious moment to start founding new international organizations of ambitious intentions, and this was to remain the first and last time that 'Le Colloque Walter Lippmann' ever met, the war intervening only a year later. Rougier had, nonetheless, given an institutional focus to 'La Renovation du Liberalisme', and had started an intellectual movement for the revival of economic liberalism that would come to fruition nearly half a century later. But to understand why economic liberalism had reached such a low ebb by the 1930s, and why these philosophers and economists found the selves gathering in Paris on the eve of war to launch their intellectual counter-revolution against collectivism, it is necessary to examine the decline of liberalism as an ideology and to reflect, in the British case in particular, on the impact made by the thinking of one man - John Maynard Keynes - who had done more than any other single individual to bring Hayek, Rougier, Ropke, Aron, von Mises and the others together in Paris to mourn the end of liberal, even civilized, society as they understood it.
The rise of collectivism in Britain has been chronicled by several historians, the first, and perhaps most famous, of them being A. V. Dicey. Indeed, it was Dicey who first identified the nineteenth century
{p. 13} as an 'age of individualism', giving way towards the end of the century to an 'age of collectivism'. More recently, and most exhaustively, W. H. Greenleaf has published his two large volumes on The Rise of Collectivism and The Ideological Heritage. As Rougier and Lippmann had in Paris in 1938, Greenleaf identifies the two great currents of the British political tradition as the opposing ideological positions of 'libertarianism' and 'collectivism'. For Greenleaf, this represents the 'basic contrast' in British political thought and practice, between 'on the one hand, the growth of a natural harmony in society achieved without recourse to state intervention [what Hayek called the state of 'spontaneous order'] and, on the other, the idea of an artificial identification of human interests resulting from legislative or other - political regulation'. All the major 'Party' ideologies in Britain - Socialism, Conservatism and Liberalism - have reflected both strands of thought in their separate historical traditions; libertarianism and collectivism have been the two fixed poles on the compass by which since the early nineteenth century, politicians have, in practice, navigated their way across the legislative map. Economic liberalism, of course, was very much an economic expression of the 'libertarian' tradition, and reached its peak as an ideological and practical economic concept in the 1870s and 1880s, tracing its ideological roots back to Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, which was published a century before, in 1776. Economic liberalism was the governing principle of both the Liberal Party, under Gladstone, and the Conservative Party, particularly under Disraeli, up to 1880. The point has often been made that for all Disraeli's purple prose about Young England and Tory Democracy, as Prime Minister from 1874 to 1880 he was as frugal in his conduct of the country's finances as Gladstone had always been.
However, at the same time as the liberal tradition seemed to reach the peak of its influence, 'collectivism' had gradually been making inroads on the liberal state, beginning with such legislation as factory reforms and public health reforms, which, to varying degrees, compelled people to carry out laws laid down by Westminster in the name of what came to be called 'social justice'. The Times was later to name this steady erosion of individual liberty, orchestrated by an ever more intrusive State, the 'Silent Revolution', which meant that even before anybody had formulated a coherent intellectual case for collectivism, Government had started to intervene in such matters as industrial relations and national education - areas where it had previously
{p. 14} feared to tread. Greenleaf has written of this general drift towards collectivism - or 'creeping collectivism' as some have called it - a process which was
{p. quote} not, at least initially, deliberately induced. Rather it rested for a long time on what Sidney Webb used to call the unconscious permeation of an overtly individualist society by a contrary principle ... He said, the 'advocates of each particular change intend no further alteration, the result is nevertheless an increasing social momentum' in the collectivist direction. The cumulative, incremental effect of these piece-meal reforms was indeed considerable. {endquote}
However, if, by the end of the nineteenth century, the increase in State powers was only small, the result of pragmatism rather than ideology, this all changed with the foundation of the Fabian Society in 1884, the creation of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and George Bernard Shaw. The Fabian Society was the first British organization to formulate and aggressively and successfully promote a coherent intellectual justification for the extension of the power of the State in pursuit of certain specific aims, such as the creation of a 'national minimum' standard of living. In Shaw's phrase, commending the original Fabian programme, the Fabian Society sought to replace the existing 'scramble for private gain' with 'the introduction of design, contrivance, and co-ordination' in the conscious pursuit of 'Collective Welfare' . The Fabians, through their tactics of 'gradualism' and 'permeation, sought to persuade all political parties of the virtues of their programme, particularly the Liberal Party and, after 1900, the nascent Labour Party. The Fabians were sowing their seeds on extremely fertile ground, for, as the memory of the old century receded, the certainties of the Victorian, liberal free-traders seemed to slip away, too. The old shibboleth of 'free trade' came under vehement attack from the politician Joseph Chamberlain with the Tariff Reform Campaign, which, though it split the Conservative Party in the process, was eventually vindicated by the gradual erection of Tariff Barriers from 19l5 onwards, culminating in the Ottawa agreements of l932. In signing these, Britain, in protectionist mood, finally created the system of 'Imperial Preference' that the Tariff Reformers had been pressing for since the first years of the century. Furthermore, the Liberal Party,
{p. 15} under the guidance of its economic mentors J. A. Hobson and L. T Hobhouse, adapted the ex-German Chancellor Bismarck's social insurance system (which had created, for instance, the first modern state-financed pension system) and applied it to Britain during Asquith's great Liberal administrations of l908 to 19l5, thus ushering in the age of'New Liberalism'. Asquith's governments embraced the new Fabian model of collectivism, and introduced old-age pensions social insurance, school meals and other 'welfare' measures. For the first time, the State took it upon itself to tax its citizens in order to fulfil a specific collectivist, social aim, that of 'social welfare'. The 'National Efficiency' movement, which embraced politicians of all parties, also supported the Fabian arguments for the increase of State powers, in order to increase 'national' defence against the rising power of Bismarckian-Wilhelmine Germany. All the legislation passed in the fourteen years before the First World War, by politicians of both the Conservative and Liberal Parties - whether in the name of 'Social Welfare, 'National Efficiency' or 'Industrial Rationalization' - represented a distinct and accelerating step towards the Fabian collectivist State, and, as Shaw later put it, 'the Fabian policy was to support and take advantage of every legislative step towards Collectivism no matter what quarter it came from, nor how little its promoters dreamt that they were advocating an instalment of Socialism.' The 'New Liberals' were in the vanguard of this movement, led by Lloyd George, whilst the old Liberals, loyal to the Party's Gladstonian roots of free-trade lassez-fare and minimum governmental intervention, were, like the libertarian political philosopher Herbert Spencer, left to lament the withering of the Victorian liberal ideological tradition. It is ironic that Spencer's greatest exposition of the liberal creed, Man Verss the State, was published in 1884, the same year as the Fabian Society was founded. As early as 1894, a Fabian, William Clarke, could say of old 'classlcal liberals' like Spencer, with only a touch of hyperbole, that
{quote} His political ideas are already as antiquated as Noah's ark. I do not know a single one of the younger men in England who is influenced by them in the slightest degree, though one hears of one occasionally, just as one hears of a freak in a dime museum. {endquote}
This steady march of collectivism was, of course, given a tremendous
{p. 16} fillip by the First World War, when the demands of war saw the final buckling of the Victorian liberal State, giving way to an unprecedented degree of central control and central economic planning, measures which were, again, supported and carried through by politicians of all parties, barring the initial resenations of the Asquithian Liberals. The coal industry was virtually nationalized in 1917 and the McKenna duties of 1915 saw the first break with the tradition of free-trade, a measure introduced by a Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer. The war witnessed the proliferation of new Whitehall departments, such as the Ministry of Munitions and the Ministry of Foods. Moreover, the very success of Britain's 'collectivist' war effort seemed to many to vindicate the claims of the Fabians that 'collectivism' was not only the route to a more just and equitable society, but that it was also a more efficient way of running a modern economy. It was no coincidence that in 1918 the Fabians persuaded the Labour Party to accept a new, specifically Socialist constitution, with its commitment in Clause IV to the nationalization of what would later be termed the 'commanding heights' of the British economy.
It was thus not surprising that collectivist measures did not end with the War; the Consenative-dominated Lloyd George coalition government founded the Ministry of Health and passed the Housing Act of 1919, which for the first time committed the Government to subsidizing local authority housing so that rents could be fixed at below the market price, at a level those needing to be housed could afford. Furtherrnore, the government also intenened in the economy as never before, instituting formal machinery for arbitration in industrial disputes in the form of the Whitely Councils; and in the name of 'rationalization', substantial state assistance was given to certain industries, such as the railway companies, to amalgamate. With the creation of the Central Electricity Board in 1926, the first state industrial monopoly was established and in the early 1930s loans were given to ailing industries such as the ship building industry. When British broadcasting began in 1926, it was created, in unprecedented fashion, as a newly born state monopoly - the British Broadcasting Company. All this entailed a considerable increase in government expenditure; total government expenditure as a percentage of Gross National Product rose from a low of nine per cent in 1870-90, to twenty-six per cent by 1926, and to sixty per cent by 1940. As Greenleaf has pointed out, increasing governmental expenditure was common to all political
{p. 17} parties. In terms of state spending, it became impossible to distinguish between a high-spending and a low-spending party. As Greenleaf concludes,
{quote} Taken together, then, these policies of national efficiency, tariff reforrn, and rationalization, as they emerged over the early decades of this century, invited substantial steps towards a collectivist economy. Their introduction was piecemeal but was none the less cumulatively significant. Moreover, they intimated, even if they did not overtly entail, the further notion of the planned economy itself, the idea of government intervention to attempt nothing less than the systematic management of life as a whole. {endquote}
Thus, by the time of the economic deluge of the 1930s, which effectively started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929, the ideological course towards collectivism was firmly set, not least by the Liberal Party of Lloyd George which was in the forefront of demanding an ever-increasing extension of governments' power and the spending of governmental money to alleviate Britain's economic problems. The famous Liberal 'Yellow Book' with which the Party launched its 1929 election campaign was but the culmination of decades of 'progressive' thinking, starting with Hobson and Hobhouse, that had produced a more collectivist vision. As early as 1903, Herbert Spencer had already noted how far the Liberal Party had strayed from its original principles:
{quote} I do not desire to be classed among those who are in these days called Liberals. In the days when the name came into use, the Liberals were those who aimed to extend the free- dom of the individual versus the power of the State, whereas now (prompted though they are by desire for popular wel- fare), Liberals as a body are continually extending the power of the State and restricting the freedom of the individual. {quote}
Spencer's gloomy prognosis for the future of classical liberalism was famously echoed by Hilaire Belloc in his book The Servile State, published in l902. Belloc predicted that 'Collectivism' would not lead to the fulfilment of the Socialists' dream of 'social justice' but to a new condition of slavery, in which the people would be completely subordi-
{p. 18} nated to the demands of a central state authority. It was a prescient book, and an early rehearsal of the arguments that Hayek would deploy thirty-two years later in The Road to Serfdom. However eloquent Belloc and Spencer might have been in their warnings about the dangers of collectivism for individual liberty, they both, nonetheless, acknowledged that they were fighting against a current that was running strongly against them.
{p. 100} The publication of The Road to Serfdom by Routledge brought Hayek the kind of intellectual celebrity that his rival Laski had been used to for a decade or more. Invitations to lecture before guest audiences, both lay and academic, began to flood in. In April 1945, he embarked on a lecture tour of North America, after publication of The Road to Serfdom by the University of Chicago Press had created the same sort of intellectual ferment in the USA as it had in Britain. The book was actually turned down - on political grounds - by three American publishers, before the Chicago economist Aaron Director secured a contract with his University Press. The book sold out within a day of publication, and the University of Chicago Press had to fight a similar battle with the paper-rationing authorities in the United States as Routledge had done in Britain to satisfy public demand for the book. The connection with the University of Chicago was to be an important one in Hayek's life, as the economics faculty there, under the direction of Frank Knight, was already fertile ground for the Hayekian view. The University sponsored and organized his tour of America in 1945 and created a special chair for him as Professor of Social and Moral Sciences in 1950 when he left the LSE.
However, the publicity that his ideas received in printed form courtesy of Routledge and Chicago was dwarfed by the condensed version of The Road to Serfdom published in the Reader's Digest of April I945. Their editions sold in the hundreds of thousands. The publication of a condensed version of the book in the Reader's Digest was arranged by Henry Hazlitt, and gave Hayek an exposure to a far larger audienct than he had expected. Propitiously, it was published on the eve of his American visit, thus altering his schedule considerably. As he later recalled:
{quote} While I was on the ship, the Reader's Digest published a condensation and when we docked in New York I was told all our plans were changed; I would be going on a nationwide
{p. 101} lecture tour beginning at NY Town Hall ... Imagine my surprise when they drove me there the next day and there were 3,000 people in the hall, plus a few score more in adjoining rooms with loudspeakers. There I was, with this battery of microphones and a veritable sea of expectant faces. {endquote}
During the course of his lecture tour, he found that The Road to Serfdom had divided opinion in America much as it had done in Britain, with the Rooseveltian New Dealers attacking it ...
With the historian Sir
{p. 102} John Clapham in the chair, Hayek proposed the idea of an 'Acton Society', in honour of the British historian whom Hayek revered as the greatest exponent of the principles of a liberal society. Hayek suggested that such a society could be a forum allowing British, German and other European intellectuals to meet and to publish ...
Quite independently, and at the same time, another economist who had been at the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann' was also suggesting a revival of Rougier's original idea of an international liberal forum. ... Wilhem Ropke, the German economist, suggested that such a forum was urgently needed to challenge the reigning intellectual fallacies of Western Europe. Ropke suggested that an international meeting of liberal scholars should be convened at regular intervals; it should publish an international periodical, appealing to the 'upper intellectual classes'. Ropke circulated his paper amongst his colleagues and to members of the 'Colloque Walter Lippmann', and raised a small amount of money for the projected periodical.
It was a Swiss businessman, involved in the work of the Institut d'Etudes Internationales at Geneva, Dr Hunold, who brought the ideas of Ropke and Hayek together. Hunold invited Hayek to address the students of the University of Zurich in November 1945 and afterwards Hunold dined with Hayek and a group of Swiss industrialists and bankers, at which point Hayek told them of his own plans for a gather-
{p. 103} ing of those intellectuals who shared his views to discuss and redefine liberalism. Hayek proposed that it would be 'an enormous help' if these people 'could come together and meet for about a week somewhere in a Swiss Hotel in order to discuss basic ideas'.
{p. 108} So, it was Hayek's international liberal society which now became the focal point of international efforts, and the delegates invited by Hayek to his inaugural Conference assembled at the Hotel du Parc on the slopes of Mont Pelerin overlooking Lac Leman on 1 April 1947. The Conference lasted until 10 April. As well as the funding secured for the Conference by Dr Hunold's Swiss backers, the participation of a large American contingent was ensured by the financial contribution of the William Volker Charities Trust. Apart from the British academics such as G. M. Young and E. L. Woodward who could not attend the meeting other prominent absentees included Walter Lippmann and Jacques Rueff. The former never became involved with what became known as the Mont Pelerin Society (MPS), whilst the latter became a regular attendee from the second meeting onwards. These absentees, added to
{p. 109} the fact that Hayek's natural contacts lay within the field of academic economics, ensured that from the start the membership of the Mont Pelerin Society was composed largely of economists. Hayek himself regretted that he could not have included more historians and political philosophers at the inaugural meeting.
This first meeting of the MPS was attended by thirty-eight people, and amongst their number were almost all those academics and intellectuals who were to be most important in the revival of economic liberalism in the post-war era. As has already been mentioned, Hayek himself identified three main intellectual centres of the revival of contemporary liberal thought, and the composition of the MPS reflected the intellectual influences of those three centres - London (the LSE), Chicago and Vienna. ... The American contingent from Chicago included the doyen of American economists, Frank Knight, Aaron Director, George Stigler and the young ProfessorMilton Friedman. There were also three economists from the Foundation of Economic Education in New York, F. A. Harper (Professor of Economics at Cornell University, 1928-46), Leonard Read and V. O. Watts. Another important American was Henry Hazlitt, the financial journalist, who had spent most of his life on the New York Times before switching to Newsweek in 1946, for which he wrote an influential business column. He was a prolific and fluent author and an unforgiving and relentless critic of Keynes. He was a very important publicist for economic liberalism and, for instance, had much to do with putting the Institute of Economic Affairson the map by referring to their first publication in his Newsweek Column.
The most prominent Austrians were, naturally, Hayek, von Mises and Popper, but they were also joined by Fritz Machlup, then a Professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo and later atJohns Hopkins, Dr Karl Brandt, then a Professor at the Food Research Institute at Stanford University, and at subsequent meetings their numbers were swelled by the presence of Gottfried Haberler, also based in America. One of the main aims for Hayek at this conference was to reintegrate the German liberal tradition into the mainstream of European thought, and so he was careful to complement the Austrian contingent with several members of what was later to be called the
{p. 110} 'Freiburg' School of Economics, the pioneers of the 'Soziale Marktwirt slaft', the 'Social Market economy'. Present at the first meeting of the MPS was Walter Eucken, the leader of the 'Freiburg School', who died in 1950 in the middle of five lectures in London on the subject of the bitter lessons which Europe still had to learn from the collectivist economic policies of the Nazis. Wilhem Ropke was also a founder-member; born in 1899, he had taught in both Germany and Austria before the Nazis had come to power, and from 1948 onwards he was an economic adviser to the Adenauer administration in Bonn The man most closely identified with this school, Ludwig Erhard, joined the MPS at the second meeting; which meant that the most constructive and celebrated school of post-war economic thought was well represented at the MPS.
{p. 118} Amongst British politicians who attended MPS meetings in the 1960s and 1970s were Geoffrey Howe, Enoch Powell, John Biffen, Keith Joseph and Rhodes Boyson as well as a clutch of journalists (such asWilliam Rees-Mogg of The Times) and members of free-market 'think-tanks' in Britain. With the international revival of economic liberalism in the period 1960 to 1980 the membership of the MPS ballooned, so that by 1980 six hundred members and guests attended a Conference at the Hoover Institute, Stanford University. Indeed, so popular had it become by that time that in his capacity as President of the MPS in 1972, Milton Friedman argued that the Society should end because its original function, as a mutual support organization for like-minded people in an intellectually hostile world, had long since been fulfilled. However, Friedman was thwarted and the MPS survives to this day.
{end}
(5) Marxist Anti-Communism
Arthur Koestler against the USSR: koestler.html.
In Australia, the CIA is said to have funded the anti-Communist Quadrant Magazine, edited by Robert Manne. But since the fall of the Soviet Union, Manne, writing in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, has consistently taken a "New Left" line ... promoting open-border migration, and that part of the aboriginal movement which blames "White Australia" for its plight (contrary to aboriginal leader Noel Pearson, who blames "progressive" policies on alcohol, drugs etc. for destroying aboriginal family life).
Many of those named in Who Paid the Piper? are Jewish intellectuals of the type of Lippmann and Manne, Left-wing but anti-Stalinist - "Marxist anti-Communist" - as Richard Kostelanetz put it: kostel.html.
Might one extend Saunders' argument, and say that the CIA funded the Trotskyist Left against the Stalinist Left? Even Orwell was a Trotskyist: burnham.html (this item, by James Burnham, deals with the appeal of Communism and National Socialism in the 1930s. Burnham, a Trotskyist, became an opponent of both).
More exactly, since some Trotskyists (mainly Spartacist) wanted to preserve the USSR, does Saunders' argument lead to the hypothesis that the CIA funded that part of the Trotskyist Left which wanted to bring down the USSR?
These same Trotskyists were promoting Free Trade and opposing national sovereignty: xTrots.html.
(6) Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution
by John B. Judis, Foreign affairs, Volume 74 No. 4, July/August 1995.
{This is a review of The Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945-1994, by John Ehrman, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995}
{p. 123} For 14 years, from the 1973 Jackson-Vanik amendment until the 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a group of intellectuals known as neoconservatives shaped, and sometimes dominated, American foreign policy. They wrote for Commentary, The Wall Street Journal, and later The National Interest. They acted through organizations like the Committee on the Present Danger and the Committee for the Free World. ...
{p. 125} The other important influence on neo-conservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism - a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism but that eludes Ehrman. Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohlstetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.
What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. In 1939, as a result of the Nazi-Soviet pact, the Trotskyist movement split, with one faction under James Burnham and Max Schachtman declaring itself opposed equally to German Nazism and Soviet communism. Under the influence of an Italian Trotskyist, Bruno Rizzi, Burnham and Schachtman envisaged the Nazi and Soviet bureaucrats and American managers as a new class {burnham.html}. While Burnham broke with the left and became an editor at National Review, Schachtman remained. The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist
{p. 126} movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class.
The neoconservatives also got their conception of intellectual and political work from their socialist past. They did not draw the kind of rigid distinction between theory and pratice that many academics and politicians do. Instead they saw theory as a form of political combat and politics as an endeavour that should be informed by theory. They saw themselves as a cadre in a cause rather than as strictly independent intellectuals. and they were willing to use theory as a partisan weapon. ...
In 1973 Jackson and the neo-conservatives who worked with him, including Wohlstetter protege Richard
{p. 127} Perle, began a campaign to link trade concessions to the Soviet Union to explicit Soviet concessions on Jewish emigration. ... They rejected Kissinger's realism ... Jackson and the neo-conservatives insisted on passing Jackson-Vanik. The Soviets then baulked at complying with its terms, and detente, from that moment, was dead. ...
They laid the basis for the massive and at least partly unnecessary American arms buildup, which may have accelerated the decline of the Soviet Union but also contributed to the decline of the American economy - leading, among other things, to the crippling deficits of the 1980s. ...
{end of quotes}
(7) Max Shpak on The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism"
Shpak points out that many Trotskyists are today known as "neo-Conservatives". They are "Conservative" because they opposed the Soviet Union, but still Marxist.
[Original Dissent]
The Fraud of Neoconservative "Anti-Communism"
by Max Shpak
May 15, 2002
http://www.originaldissent.com/shpak051502.html
{start} Neoconservatives and their apologists would have the public believe that the neocons were former Leftists who saw the light and came to reject liberal or Marxist ideology as a matter of conviction and principle. Regrettably, this official line has come to be conventional wisdom, no doubt reflecting neocon efforts to hide the fact that their transformation was neither sincerely motivated nor sincerely enacted. To understandthe real agenda that drove and continues to drive much of neoconservatism, one needs to look back to the origins of the movement and the cultural backgrounds of those who lead it.
It is a well-established fact that many of the early luminaries of neoconservatism (most famously Irving Kristol in the 1940's, a more recent famous example being David Horowitz) came from Marxist backgrounds, and that neoconservatism (like Marxism itself) began and continues to be a largely a phenomenon of Jewish intellectualism. In the early part of the 20th century, Marxism attracted a disproportionate pool of Jewish recruits for a number of obvious reasons. There are a number of complex psychological and social reasons for the attraction, all of which largely stem from the fact that Marxist internationalism is an ideology which by its very nature finds disciples among a rootless, anti-religious urban intelligentsia.
More important for the purposes of this analysis, however, are the practical reasons for Jewish sympathy with Bolshevism. European and American Jews alike carried deep-seated hatreds for the traditional regimes and religions of the European continent, particularly Czarist Russia and various Eastern European nations due to (real and imagined) "persecution" and "pogroms" that occurred there. Thus, when the Bolsheviks overthrew the Czar, destroyed the hated Orthodox Church, rendered powerless the landed religious peasantry, and replaced traditional Russian authority with a largely Jewish Commissariate, world Jewry (including alleged "capitalists" like the Schiffs and Rothschilds) embraced the Revolution and Marxist ideology alike.
With Russia becoming an effective Jewish colony where "anti-Semitism" was an offense punishable by death and the native gentile culture was effectively stamped out (thanks to a leadership consisting mainly of Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Severdlov, held together under the stewardship of the obsequious philosemite Lenin), Jews throughout the world put their hopes in the possibility of similar revolutions elsewhere. Indeed, their comrades in arms were hard at work affecting similar changes in Hungary (Kuhn), Austria (Adler) and Germany (Eisner). The rise of Fascist and Nazi movements only served to further polarize Jewish support in favor of international communism.
This near unanimity would change as a result of two developments: a shift in the character of Soviet Communism on the one hand and the foundation of the State of Israel on the other. Stalin's purges of many of his former Bolshevik colleagues (including Trotsky, who was assassinated while in exile), his 1939 pact with Hitler, and rumors of Stalin's own anti-Jewish prejudices gave many would-be supporters pause. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union, it became clear the Russian masses would not fight for the sake of Bolshevism, an ideology that brought them so much misery, but rather for the sake of Russian blood and soil. From then on, the Soviet leadership had to court the very Russian nationalist elements that the early Bolsheviks had worked so hard to stamp out. This lead to an increasing tolerance towards the Russian Orthodox Church and a decreased Jewish presence in the Soviet politburo and KGB. Thus, the USSR was "betraying" the very elements that made it attractive to the Jewish establishment to begin with.
Perhaps even more significant a factor in the origins of neoconservatism was the emergence of an independent Israeli state. While many Jewish Marxists eagerly supported the Zionist state, the more intellectually consistent Left opposed Zionism on the grounds that all nationalisms, including Jewish ones, are enemies of global proletarian revolution. Thus, Jewish leftists who once advocated internationalism for gentile nations were forced to come to terms with the implications of this ideology for their own nationalist sentiments. Thus, they needed an ideology which would let them have their cake (opposing gentile nationalism) and eat it too (by supporting Israel), and they found just such a worldview with neoconservatism.
At the same time, although the Soviet Union initially courted Israel during the 1948 wars of independence, it became clear to the Israeli government that in world polarized between the United States and the Soviet Union the former would be wealthier and more pliant cash cow to milk. By the 1950's and the coming of the Suez Wars, regardless of residual Jewish loyalties to Communism, the battle lines were already drawn, with Israel in the US/Western camp and the Arab nations forced to make alliances of convenience with the Soviet Union.
It is hardly a coincidence that the changing character of Soviet Communism and the status of Israel as a US ally came at the same time that neoconservatism was becoming an influential political movement. For all of their talk about "capitalism," "democracy," "freedom," and "free markets," the fact that so many Jewish leftists turned on a dime to back the US in the Cold War because America could serve as a life support system for Israel and a bulwark against resurgent Russian "anti-Semitism" makes their real agenda entirely transparent. One can witness an identical phenomenon taking place today, as many Jewish liberal Democrats switch party ranks and join the GOP because of the latter's stronger support for Israel and harder line with the Arab nations. All of the window dressing about their newfound "patriotism" and "Americanism" is a sham designed to mask the fact that the question for the neocons has always been and will always be "is it good for the Jews?"
The different agendas driving neocon Cold Warriors as opposed to their erstwhile Old Right allies could be seen on any number of fronts. The most obvious one has been the different reactions in the two camps to Russia after the end of the Cold War. While paleoconservative leaning Cold Warriors such as Pat Buchanan have pushed for normalized relations with Russia, the neocons continue to fight on the Cold War, enthusiastically supporting Chechen separatists as "freedom fighters" and advocating NATO expansion. The reasons for this difference are entirely obvious: the Old Right's enemy was Communist ideology, while neoconservative Jews nurtured a hatred for Russian nationalism. Thus post-Communist Russia is still very much a threat to the latter, particularly with resurgent Russian "ultra-nationalism" and "anti-Semitism," while in the absence of Communist rule the above are of little concern to the Old Right.
For all their talk about "anti-Communism," the real engine driving neocon Cold Warrior instincts was punishing the hated Russian goyim for the sin of "anti-Semitism," not any opposition to residual or latent Marxism. As further evidence that this is the case, one need only consider the fact that while the Old Right championed Christian dissidents such as Solzhenitsyn, to the neocons the only legimate "dissidents" were Zionists likeNatan Sharansky, just as the only "refugees" championed by the neos were invariably Jewish (including today's shady Odessa Mafiosi). Solzhenitsyn represented the Russian nationalism and Orthodox Church that made so many of the neocons' predecessors embrace Bolshevism, thus Solzhenitsyn and the plight of Christian dissidents were relegated to obscurity in neocon publications, while Zionist noise-makers in the USSR were given a hero's welcome.
In this regard, the neocons are the true heirs to Leon Trotsky, who condemned Stalin and his followers not so much for their brutality (as commander of the Red Army and overseer of Lenin's terrorist CHEKA, Trotsky was no stranger to brutality and sadism) but for their "anti-Semitism" and "betrayal of the Revolution." Trotsky's main critique of Stalinism seemed to be that Stalin was moving Russia in a nationalist direction rather than working towards the establishment of an international "proletarian" vanguard. The fact that the intellectual ancestors of neoconservatism had not an unkind word to say about Bolshevism while Leninist-Trotskyite goals were being fulfilled suggests that it was not so much ideological reconsideration as tribal self-interest that drove these most unlikely conversos.
Because their move from the Left to a pseudo-right was insincere, one would expect to find a whole range of issues where the neocons retain leftist instincts and remain true to their Trotskyite heritage. Indeed this is the case. In their portrayal of the Cold War as a struggle between "capitalism" on the one hand and "socialism" on the other, the neocons try to minimize the fact that in many ways the conflict between the Bolsheviks and the West was over much more than economic systems. To most on the Old Right, the economic issues were at best peripheral: Marxism was opposed because it was materialistic, atheistic, and because it rejected nationalism and patriotism in the name of global revolution.
Most neocons came from a culture that was every bit as materialistic and cosmopolitan as the early Bolshevik leaders, so it is rather unlikely that they would have any quarrel with these aspects of Communist doctrine. The fact that neoconservatism is an ideology which is materialistic in nature and internationalist in focus (with its talk of "global democracy" and "global markets") makes it obvious that the fundamental underpinnings of the Marxist Left are alive and well among the scribblers of Commentary and The Weekly Standard. Their "conservative" pretenses seem limited to the fact that they oppose "socialism" (of the nationalist variety) in the name of "capitalism" (of the internationalist variety), and for all too many naïve people that seems to be sufficient and believable.
Understanding the true nature of the neoconservatives illuminates the essence of the struggle between the Right and the Left. It was never a struggle between "capitalism" and "socialism" as neoconservative or Communist progaganda would have one believe. Rather, it was always a conflict between spiritualism and materialism, between nationalism and globalism, between tradition and subversion, between the defenders of Western Civilization and its enemies. With the battle lines drawn as such, it is abundantly clear where the neocons stand. Many "capitalists" understood that economic means are not significant, only the desired end. Jacob Schiff understood it when he financed the Bolsheviks, just as Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner, Marc Rich, Boris Berezovsky, and George Soros understand that their form of "capitalism" is fully compatible withthe essence of the Left, and that they can find friends and allies among the ostensibly conservative neocons.
Unfortunately, many Rightists are not nearly as perceptive in their choice of allies.
May 15, 2002
{end}
(8) Mick Hume unmasked as a Neo-Con
Living Marxism (LM Magazine), was a "Marxist" magazine which opposed political correctness - ostensibly, anyway. It was edited by Mick Hume.
LM said that the Green movement originated in Nazi Germany. A 2-part TV series was broadcast in Britain and Australia on this theme, put together by LM.
So LM were anti-Nazi, but anti-Green.
They opposed the put-down of men that has occurred under Feminism. Yet they spoke up in favour of refugees (asylum-seekers) being able to enter Britain fairly freely.
They opposed censorship, even of pornography, and they supported teenage sex.
8.1 Mick Hume supported fox hunting. The following item shows that, after LM folded, he became a columnist for The Times (hardly a sign of being an "outsider"):
The Real Rural Agenda by Mick Hume
The Times columnist Mick Hume today writes a thought-provoking and hard-hitting piece ridiculing New Labour's handling of the hunting issue and defending the civil liberties of those who wish to hunt.. ...
http://www.countryside-alliance.org/newsextra/001218mick.htm
8.2 Not only did the Trotskyist site http://www.wsws.org support LM; Emperors' Clothes also ran Mick Hume's articles. A common feature of all 3 is that they deny a specifically "Jewish" role in Communism, and repudiate the suggestion of Mossad involvement in 9-11. Mike Ruppert likewise.
They want us to blame the Empire; but they divert attention from the Jewish dominance of that Empire.
The Zionists' trick has been to "converge" their plans with the Empire's, so that Imperial leaders can't tell the difference.
Another Voice, by Mick Hume (on Emperor's Clothes):
http://emperors-clothes.com/articles/hume/VOICE.html
8.3 Mick Hume now runs http://www.spiked-online.com and http://www.spiked-online.co.uk (caution: these sites make my computer hang).
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,41406,00.html
by Aparna Kumar
... Among the British intelligentsia and media establishment, Hume has a hard-won reputation as a crusader for free speech at any cost, especially that which offends. In fact, "muckraker" is a badge he wears with pride. "(Spiked) is trying to set a new agenda. It stands for the Right to be Offensive," he wrote in an e-mail.
Over the years, Hume's politics have vacillated between the poles of communism and libertarianism, although his critics hail mostly from the left. His notoriety peaked when LM (formerly Living Marxism) -- a small-circulation culture and current affairs magazine where he was a founding editor -- was ordered to pay 375,000 pounds in damages to the British news network ITN in a controversial libel case last year.
But for a man who went from Marxist-magazine founder to columnist for the conservative Times (of London), the leap to online publishing threatens to be his biggest splash yet. ...
8.4 Melanie Phillips, another LM contributor, has since come out as a Zionist:
The new anti-Semitism
The Spectator, 22 March 2003 Melanie Philips
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/870739/posts
8.5 Now Mick Hume has also come out as a Zionist. He says the West is turning against Israel because it is losing confidence in itself:
His article at the Times was reproduced on several sites in Israel
e.g. the Weizmann site:
Mick Hume in The Times. Excerpted from The Times, April 22, 2002
The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself. by Mick Hume ...
http://www.weizmann.ac.il/~comartin/israel/hume.html
and the Likud site:
The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing ... The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself.
By Mick Hume, London Times, April 22, 2002. A few months ... http://www.likud.nl/press189.html
Here's Hume's article, reproduced on the Likud site:
The West is turning on Israel today because it is losing confidence in itself
By Mick Hume, London Times, April 22, 2002
... As one who has long sympathised with the Palestinian cause, I feel increasingly suspicious of what is behind the anti-Israeli turn in Western opinion. The newfound discomfort with Israeli aggression looks less like a response to events in the Middle East than a symptom of the West's loss of conviction in itself.
It is becoming clear that, while the Israelis stand accused of a brutal crackdown in the Palestinian refugee camp at Jenin, there was no massacre of civilians. Yet last week leading institutions and commentators were quick to give credence to the wilder claims of war crimes and secret mass graves. Those who suggest that the horrors of Jenin are unique in the annals of the Arab-Israeli conflict have short memories.
Instead, Israel is now being widely condemned for the sort of 'anti-terrorist' action that might have been tacitly condoned in the past. The new mood is strongest in Europe. Yet even in America the Israeli lobby is on the defensive, its columnists and Congressmen making shrill demands for support that would once have been unnecessary. Jewish groups boycotted the LA Times last week after an article compared Ariel Sharon to Slobodan Milosevic.
The reaction against Israel is not old-fashioned anti-Semitism, Even prominent Jews are coming out as anti-Israeli. The leading Labour MP Gerald Kaufman - a veteran Zionist - has branded Israel a pariah state and suggested that Sharon might be a war criminal.
"Every Jew needs to sob their heart out," says a spokeswoman for one Washington peace group: "We need to build healing mechanisms."
In the eyes of many today, Israel's crime is to be the most forceful expression of Western values. The Israeli state is seen as a beachhead of Western civilisation in a hostile world. That used to be its greatest asset. Today, however, Western civilisation has fallen into disrepute even within its own heartlands, and Israel's image has suffered accordingly.
Israel has never been able to accept completely such trends as political correctness, relativism and self-doubt. If it did so, the Israeli state would be finished. Today, however, Israel's unambiguous attitude of 'we're right and you're wrong', and defence of national sovereignty against the intrusions of international bodies, are embarrassing reminders of the kind of conviction that Western elites no longer feel able to express. The Israeli defence of its actions in Jenin: "at least we sent our men in to fight, instead of flattening everything from 50,000ft", is likely to have touched a raw nerve in Washington and Whitehall. ...
While Western leaders turn their backs on their old ally, their enemies turn on Israel as a scapegoat for the world's ills. Israel and the Jews have become the targets of a sort of ersatz anti-imperialism.
A global consensus against Israel has taken shape among all those who hate the values of Western society, an unholy alliance of Islamic fundamentalists with fashionable anti-capitalists. The 50 Western demonstrators who turned up at Yassir Arafat's besieged Ramallah compound bizarrely included Jose Bove, the French farmer famous for smashing up a McDonald's. ...
Sympathy with the terrible plight of Jenin is no reason to endorse the anti-imperialism of idiots. Populist anti-Israeli rhetoric is cheap, but offers no solutions to the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East. And climbing on the backs of the victims to strike moralistic postures is just, as the diplomatic French might say, merde.
{end}
another Jewish site:
EUROPE: HOME OF ANTI-SEMITISM ...
a Mick Hume column in the UK Times. The guy is historically a Palestinian sympathizer, but he writes about this phenomenon of piling on Israel - and blames it ...
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/folder/apr_22_europe_hone_of_antisemitism.guest.html
8.6 Another item by Hume in the same vein:
The anti-imperialism of fools By Mick Hume
New Statesman (British leftist magazine) Monday 17th June 2002
http://virus.lucifer.com/virus/2499.html
Western leftists find themselves in strange company when it comes to the Middle East. Are they really happy to line up with neo-Nazis and Islamic fundamentalists? ... {end}
8.7 Neocons are former leftists - often Trotskyist - who support Zionism, and oppose the Left because it sides with the Palestinians and Arabs in the face of Israeli expansionism.
The Neocons therefore joined the "Right-wing" political parties, but retain many "Far Left" social policies, such as favouring pornography, gay rights etc.
Neocons support Globalization (Free Trade, i.e. Capitalism), yet endorse most (but not all) of the New Left's cultural policies.
The Ayn Rand Institute typifies the Neocon policy mix:
(a) "libertarianism" -
Mar. 19, 2003 Thought Control Government should not have the power to legislate morality.
By Onkar Ghate http://www.aynrand.org/medialink/thoughtcontrol.shtml
{quote} You are jolted awake at 1:00 a.m. by loud knocking on the door. Alarmed, you and your girlfriend rise to answer. The police barge in and arrest you both on suspicion of having had premarital sex. Sound like something that would happen only in a dictatorship like Iraq's or China's? Next week the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that if not overturned will grant legitimacy to such governmental power. ... At issue is notwhether a particular sexual practice among consenting adults is in fact moral or immoral. At issue is something much broader: whether the government should have the power to enter your home and arrest you for having sex because it regards your sexual desires as "base," ... At issue is whether the government should have the power to legislate morality. If you want to live in a free society, the answer is: No. ... {endquote}
(b) Zionism
In Moral Defense of Israel
A Supplemental Issue of Impact, Newsletter of the Ayn Rand Institute, September 2002 http://www.aynrand.org/site/DocServer/israel_sept_2002.pdf?docID=164
We hold that the state of Israel has a moral right to exist and to defend itself against attack - and that the United States should unequivocally support Israel. On televi-sion, on radio, in newspapers, on college campuses - throughout our culture, the Ayn Rand Institute (ARI) has been de-fending the use of retaliatory force against terrorists. This ad hoc publication out-lines our position and illustrates the im-pact of our intellectual activism. We stand for individual rights and freedom. In the name of justice, of defending the good, we support Israel. In a region dominated by despotism and to-talitarian dictatorships, Israel alone up-holds rights. Defending Israel - our only true ally in the Mideast - is in America's own self-interest.
No Moral Equality Between Israel and Its Enemies
Israel and those who attack it are not moral equals. Israel is a free, Westernized country, which recognizes the individual rights of its citizens (such as their right to prop-erty and freedom of speech). It uses military force only in self-defense, in order to protect itself. Those attacking Israel, by contrast, are terrorist organizations, theocracies, dictatorships and would-be dictators. They do not recognize the individual rights of their own subjects, much less those of the citizens of Israel. They initiate force indiscriminately in order to retain and expand their power. In contrast to the state of Israel, such organizations and regimes have no moral right to exist.
Israel Attacked for Its Virtues Fundamentally, Israel is the target of these organizations and regimes precisely be- cause of its virtues: it is an oasis of freedom and prosperity in a desert of tyranny and stagnation. If Israel is destroyed, the ene-mies of freedom attacking it will be able to turn their full attention to the United States. The United States must not let this happen.
Israel's War Is America's War
In America's war against terrorism, it is imperative that America distinguish friend from foe, good from evil, the opponents of terrorism from the perpetrators. In the name of justice and self-preservation, therefore, America should uncompromisingly encour-age and support Israel in the common fight against the enemies of freedom. ...
{end}
(9) Robert Manne unmasked as a Neocon
Robert Manne is a regular commentator in the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age. The Age published the following article by Manne, for the 50th anniversay of Stalin's death.
Manne, professor of politics at La Trobe University, has for years given the impression of being anti-communist. This was the tenor of his book Shadows of 1917; during the Cold War he was co-editor of QuadrantMagazine, funded in part by the CIA.
He had advised the Labor Party to ditch Feminism, but in recent years his articles on ethnic issues have taken a "Far Left" flavour: he takes a "progressive" stance on Aboriginal issues, and open borders (asylum seekers should be able to just turn up, without having to apply to come here).
On the Aboriginal issue, he opposes Noel Pearson, the Aboriginal leader who says that "progressive" forces are destroying Aboriginal culture (http://www.abc.net.au/austory/transcripts/s723570.htm; for Manne's opposition see http://old.smh.com.au/news/0111/26/opinion/opinion1.html).
Manne is Jewish; Australian Jewish News did a feature on him, in the issue of Friday, February 23, 2003:
True to the Inner Manne
{quote} POLITICAL historian Robert Manne remembers his bar mitzvah fondly and the years he taught in religion school at Temple Beth Israel, Melbourne.
In his office at La Trobe University, where he has been awarded a personal chair, Professor Manne, 55, who has been an associate professor in politics at the university for some years and is now La Trobe's professor of politics, is discussing what makes him Jewish.
Yet beyond the gate of teenage memories, the standard interviewer's questions about his involvement with the community do not attract the usual answers that refer to shuls, clubs and associations. Although he has close Jewish friends, he is not communally active.
But tap into his sense of values and you find a distinctly Jewish perspective. A sense of a shared heritage of rootlessness, displacement and subsequent passion for social justice have been constants in his life, as has a sense of moderation and reason. ...
With his Cold War-era distaste for communist regimes in Europe and Asia losing much of its relevance after the early 1990s, Manne became caught up in a domestic sea change. ...
"And in part, my interest in certain issues has been enlivened since the end of the Cold War, particularly my attitudes to reconciliation and the Aboriginal question, which I spend a lot of time thinking about, and my attitude to Australian multiculturalism, which I was sceptical about until I became convinced it was an important move. Those things have made me appear to be moving to the left." ...
In his regular opinion pieces for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, he has sounded warnings about xenophobia, racism in Australia and the popular backlash against ideas that began in the 1970s the realisation that Australia is answerable to its indigenous population, that it is a multicultural society and that it has a place in the broader Asian region. ...
His mother fled Germany and his father fled Austria on the eve of World War II, and later met and married in Australia. Untold numbers of family members perished in the Holocaust.
"It's easier for Jewish people to imagine severe forms of powerlessness because of Jewish history, particularly the 20th century. In my own case, it's my family's history and their sense of powerlessness and injustice."
When Manne sees asylum-seekers, he sees his own parents running for their lives to a land of opportunity. ...
{end of feature on Manne}
Not only does Manne's article in The Age (below) fail to mention his Jewish identity; the words "Jew" and "Jewish" do not appear in connection with communism, in the article at all, except as Stalin's paranoia over the Jewish Antifascist Committee and Doctors' Plot.
In the following article one notes that, although Manne castigates Stalin, he makes no criticisms of Trotsky. No mention that he wrote a book justifying the Red Terror (worst.html).
Nor does he mention that the Bolshevik regime had been created by Jews (lenin-trotsky.html); that Stalin turned the tables on them (kaganovich.html).
There's no mention of the plan for a Jewish Crimea, put by the the Jewish Antifascist Committee, which alarmed Stalin (sudoplat.html). No mention of the 1946 Baruch Plan for World Government, crafted by David Lilienthal and Bernard Baruch - both Jews - and put to Stalin by the United States (baruch-plan.html). No mention that Stalin was murdered, shortly after the Doctors Plot issue arose (death-of-stalin.html).
One might ask, "Is this the best that Jewish intellect can offer?" But fortunately, Benjamin Ginsberg, also a Jew, and Professor of Political Science at John Hopkins University, puts the record straight on the Jewish role in Bolshevism: ginsberg.html.
Setting the standard for Manne, one might say. But if Manne is a Neocon - a Trotskyist who switched sides when the Jewish Bolsheviks lost control in the USSR, but retains many Trotskyist ideas - then his seemingly contradictory positions make sense.
Manne opposes the war in Iraq, but diverts attention from the Jewish cabal behind it (on this topic see http://www.dailystar.com.lb/05_04_03/art22.asp,
http://www.sacbee.com/24hour/special_reports/iraq/bee/story/6408561p-7360864c.html, http://www.middleeast.org/launch/redirect.cgi?a=&num=248, http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/26/nyregion/26PROF.html,http://www.israelnationalnews.com/article.php3?id=2125).
Man of steel, heart of stone
Robert Manne
The Age, Melbourne
Date: March 5 2003
http://www.theage.com.au/text/articles/2003/03/04/1046540186583.htm
He was nothing more than a tyrant, nothing less than evil. Robert Manne examines the legacy of Joseph Stalin, who died 50 years ago today.
In November 1940, during the period of the Nazi-Soviet pact, Soviet foreign minister Molotov visited Berlin. "I know that history will remember Stalin," Hitler told him, "but it will also remember me."
Hitler was right. Both he and Stalin were destined to be remembered as the 20th century's two most consequential political figures and the two most terrible tyrants known to history.
Stalin died 50 years ago today. He was born, as Iosif Dzugashvili, of poorest Georgian peasant stock. The family was not close. Stalin's father was a cobbler, a wife beater and a drunk. From the time he left the Orthodox seminary to join the Bolshevik party in 1904 to the year of her death in 1937, Stalin met his mother on no more than four occasions. With the partial exception of his first wife, who died in 1907, Stalin appears to have experienced throughout his life no attachment to any human being.
The Bolshevik party was the most extreme tendency of Russian Marxism. Before the abdication of the tsar in February 1917, Stalin worked as a professional revolutionary, and he was arrested and exiled several times. By the time he was voted onto the Bolshevik Central Committee in 1912, he had become the party's expert on the problem of the empire's non-Russian minority nationalities.
While Stalin's personal role in the almost bloodless seizure of power in Russia in October 1917 was considerably less glorious than he would later pretend, he did play a significant part in the military victory over the White Armies in the unbelievably savage civil war of 1918-20.
Yet, at that stage, even his more brilliant comrades continued to look down on him as a nonentity, as the "grey blur", or as Leon Trotsky put it, the "outstanding mediocrity". Stalin never forgot a slight. For their condescension, Stalin's comrades would later pay a high price.
Lenin suffered a series of strokes between November 1922 and his death in January 1924. During these months his misgivings about Stalin grew, because of his brutal administrative style, and the unheard of insolence he displayed towards Krupskaya, Lenin's wife.
In his final political will, Lenin suggested removing Stalin from the general secretaryship. Because they feared Trotsky and not Stalin, and because Lenin had been less than complimentary about all of them, Stalin's colleagues helped to suppress Lenin's will.
During the 1920s, the members of the post-Lenin Politburo became absorbed in a fierce and complex political struggle. The stakes were high - not merely the Lenin succession but the very future of the revolution, which all accepted was the most important historical event in the movement towards ending class oppression and emancipating humankind.
In the first phase of the struggle Trotsky was isolated and defeated by all his colleagues. In the second phase the "Right-Centre", led by Bukharin and Stalin, routed the Zinoviev-Kamenev "Left". In the third phase, Stalin detached himself from, and politically destroyed, the Bukharin "Right".
Why did Stalin triumph? In part, he triumphed because his opponents took each other far more seriously than they did Stalin, until it was too late; in part because Stalin had an unparalleled capacity to separate questions of power from questions of ideology; in part because, as general secretary, Stalin possessed vast resources of political patronage, which he dispensed with great skill; and in part, it must be said, because in his cunning and unscrupulousness, and also in the sensitivity of his antennae to the mood of the Bolshevik rank and file, Stalin proved to be far superior politically to his more theoretically gifted colleagues.
By the late 1920s Stalin's victory over his rivals was complete.
Stalin now lurched violently to the policies of the ultra-Left. In the space of a few months in 1929-30, in conditions of indescribable chaos, the Stalin leadership used an iron broom to sweep the entire peasantry from their ancestral communes onto vast state-controlled collective farms. As part of the collectivisation drive, millions of slightly more prosperous peasants, the so-called "kulaks", were either deported for resettlement to the remotest regions or transported, as forced labour, to the Soviet concentration camp system, the Gulag Archipelago.
Collectivisation coincided with Stalin's decision to industrialise the Soviet Union at breakneck speed. The most immediate purpose of collectivisation was to force peasants to deliver grain to the regime, either to feed the factory workers, or for the export income needed to pay for the imports of foreign machinery Soviet heavy industry required.
In the early 1930s, Stalin collected grain quotas even when there was nothing for the peasants to eat. In his "man-made famine" of 1933, perhaps five million Ukrainian peasants starved to death.
The Communist Party celebrated the economic achievements at the Congress of Victors in 1934. Stalin was acclaimed, not merely as the leader of the party, but as a towering, universal genius in every human sphere.
Beneath the surface, however, reality was more complex. At the congress, corridor discussions about removing Stalin from his post as general secretary took place. In the secret ballot for the Central Committee, more than 100 of the 2000 or so delegates crossed out Stalin's name. Only three had crossed out the name of the popular Leningrad party boss, Sergei Kirov.
The Congress of Victors marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union. Stalin no longer trusted the Communist Party. As an immediate measure he arranged for the assassination of Kirov, whose death he ostentatiously mourned. More important, he decided that there existed inside the Soviet Union a vast anti-socialist conspiracy. Stalin was convinced that the leader of this conspiracy was the man he most feared and loathed, Leon Trotsky.
Unfortunately, because he had been sent into foreign exile by Stalin, Trotsky was not available for arrest, trial and execution. However, Stalin was also convinced that the Trotsky conspiracy inside the Soviet Union was led by Zinoviev and Kamenev. Both were arrested and, in 1936, were put on public trial where they confessed abjectly to heinous crimes. They were executed without delay. Stalin soon came to the opinion that the conspiracy had spread to the Right. In 1938 the show trial of Bukharin and his supporters took place.
In an atmosphere of hysteria, a Soviet-wide drive to root out the entirely fictitious Trotskyite conspiracy began. In 1937 and 1938 - the most horrific years in Russia's long and terrible history - almost one million "counter-revolutionaries" were executed, while perhaps five million were dispatched to the Gulag Archipelago, where the vast majority died.
Stalin personally signed thousands of death warrants. He often took pleasure in taunting former comrades with hints about their impending deaths. In these years, more than half the delegates at the Congress of Victors disappeared.
Stalin believed that the conspiracy had reached the Soviet army. Three of the army's five marshals and 15 of its 16 army commanders were executed. As the Soviet dissident historian, Roy Medvedev, puts it: "The shocking truth can be stated quite simply: never did the officer staff of any army suffer such great losses in any war as the Soviet army suffered in the time of peace."
During the 1930s, Stalin became the champion of the international anti-fascist movement, and the withering critic of the appeasement of Nazi Germany by the democratic powers, Britain and France. It was because of this that many left-wing intellectuals joined communist parties at this time.
By mid-1939, as the German invasion of Poland loomed, Stalin was effectively offered a choice between a military alliance with Britain and France or acceptance of a non-aggression pact with Germany. The West offered Stalin participation in the front-line of a continental war, while Hitler offered him the mirage of peace, the occupation of eastern Poland and the Baltic states, and more time to arm. Stalin chose Germany.
Between August 1939 and June 1941, he was almost fanatical in his determination to do nothing that could be construed as a provocation to Germany. Consequently, when the massive German attack inevitably came, on June 22, 1941, the Soviet Army was militarily and psychologically unprepared. For the only time in his life Stalin's resolution broke. But it soon returned. According to his Russian biographer, General Dmitri Volkogonov, while Stalin was not a brilliant supreme commander of the Soviet armed forces he was highly competent. He listened to his talented generals; he developed a broad strategic grasp; he showed judgement in his refusal to evacuate Moscow and in his appeal to old-style Russian patriotism rather than proletarian solidarity.
On the basis of the 1930s industrialisation, the USSR became one of the world's great arsenals. In order to secure victory over Germany, Stalin was unconcerned about how many millions of his soldiers or civilians died. Nazi Germany was essentially conquered on the eastern front. This represents Stalin's one and only contribution to the improvement of mankind.
Soon after the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the Soviet-British-American alliance began to fall apart. The British and Americans encouraged the Soviet Army into eastern Europe. Generally, they were sympathetic to Soviet border claims and demands for the creation of "friendly" governments in the lands between Germany and the USSR. They found it impossible, however, to reconcile themselves to Soviet political methods or the gradual imposition of single-party dictatorship in the areas the Red Army occupied. By 1948 Europe was effectively divided between a Soviet East and an Anglo-American West. Eastern Europe was swiftly Stalinised. In response to the Soviet military threat, NATO formed. In Germany, a dangerous military stand-off over the Soviet blockade of West Berlin arose. The Cold War had arrived. A third world war seemed more likely than not.
As always, inside Stalin's mind, morbid suspicions, mirroring the situation in the external world, took hold. Stalin dispatched to the Gulag vast numbers of returned Soviet soldiers who were tainted by knowledge of another, non-Soviet, reality.
Then, following the creation of Israel, Stalin's thoughts turned to the Jews. In 1952, he brought the leaders of the wartime Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to trial. A vast anti-Semitic action was, most likely, being planned. As his health deteriorated, Stalin's gaze turned towards those around his bed. The organs of Beria's secret police began to investigate what was called "the doctors' plot". On March 5, 1953 - most likely to the genuine anguish of the Soviet people and the no less genuine relief of the members of his close entourage - Stalin finally died.
Stalin left after him nothing but the taste of ash in the mouth. He was not responsible for the creation of the brutal single-party dictatorship in Russia. Credit for that belongs to Lenin. Yet upon the Leninist foundations a number of possible futures - none that was likely to be democratic or prosperous - might have been built. That it was Stalin who succeeded Lenin, and not Trotsky or Bukharin or someone else, mattered a great deal.
For it was Stalin who was responsible for the needless deaths of perhaps 20 million human beings. And it was Stalin, more than anyone else, who cut the utopian 19th century idea of socialism from its humanitarian moorings and transformed it into a 20th century nightmare of economic irrationality and privation, mind-numbing ideological conformity and hypocrisy, barracks-style social regimentation, primeval leader worship, and universal fear.
{end}
(10) Karl A. Wittfogel and the (Jewish) Frankfurt School: Neocons
10.1 Karl Wittfogel (1896-1988)
http://www.riseofthewest.net/thinkers/wittfogel01.htm
"Karl A. Wittfogel was born on 06 September 1896 in Woltersdorf (Germany). ... In 1920-1921, he became a high school teacher in Tinz. In 1920, Wittfogel joined the communist party. ...
"Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, in 1939, Wittfogel broke with the communist party. In the afterwar time, he became an outspoken opponent of the Russian and Chinese communist empires. ...
10.2 The Frankfurt School are the pioneers of Deconstruction and the "political correctness" Culture War raging in the West at present. The leading figures were Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse ... but Wittfogel was in there too.
In perspective: Theodor Adorno
by DAVE HARKER, Manchester
http://www2.rz.hu-berlin.de/fpm/texte/harker3.htm
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno was born in Frankfurt in 1903 into a wealthy, highly-cultivated, liberal-bourgeois family. His father was an assimilated Jewish wine merchant who had converted to Protestantism, and his mother was the Catholic daughter of a Corsican-French army officer and a German-born singer. ...
Adorno... since 1928 he had put a lot of effort into cultivating an old acquaintance, Max Horkheimer, Director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research.
The Cafe Marx
The Frankfurt Institute was proposed in 1923, the same year as the defeat of the German Revolution. The impetus came from Felix Weill, a millionaire and self-styled 'salon Bolshevik' ...
By 1937, Horkheimer had announced a systematic shift of emphasis away from a marxist belief in the existence of 'class domination' towards an effectively liberal-bourgeois perspective of 'social justice', and away from marxist methods of analysis to what he liked to call 'critical theory'. ...
In 1938 Adorno followed the Institute to the USA.
Notes
36 Horkheimer became disillusioned after the murders of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebnecht in 1919, though he seems to have remained intellectually optimistic about the Soviet experiment until at least 1927. Marcuse had had some practical political experience in the SPD in 1917-1918, left on account of what he saw as its 'betrayal of the proletariat', but was in touch with Left Oppositionists {Trotskyists} so late as 1927. Langerhaus, Mandelbaum and Biehahn have been characterised as Korschists or Trotskyists, and yet Langerhaus, along with Massing and Gomperz have also been described as either members of (or friendly towards) the KPD up until some point in the 1930s. Grossman and Pollock were KPD members, Wittfogel was a KPD candidate in Reichstag elections ... Wittfogel seems to have given up the struggle inside the KPD by 1934, while Massing was lucky to be allowed to leave Moscow and the Party in 1938. Only Grossmann, a former member of the Polish CP, retained an unreflective enthusiasm for the Soviet Union into the 1940s, though he was already marginalised at the Institute by the time of the first Moscow Trials.
58 ... known communists like Wittfogel and Grossman were not allowed to have offices along with the rest of the staff in New York. Horkheimer and his staff worked hard to counter this left-wing reputation and after the USA entered the war in 1941, they not only took money for research from CBS and the Rockefeller Foundation but also went to work for the US State directly. Neumann went to the Washington-based Board of Economic Warfare, and later the Intelligence Division of the Office of the US Chief of Staff. Kirchheimer worked alongside Gurland as a staff member of the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) at the State Department.Marcuse went to the Office of War Information in the State Department, and then worked with Neumann at the OSS, up to the time of the Korean War. Lowenthal also worked at the Office of War Information before he was appointed Director of the Research Department at the 'Voice of America' in 1949.
{end} more at wittfogel2.html.
(11) Convergence between the USSR and the West
The usual Convergence theory comes via Anatoliy Golitsyn. An ex-Soviet agent, he claimed that Convergence was a Soviet plot: convergence.html.
The evidence I have accumulated shows otherwise. It shows that Jews had gradually lost control of the Soviet Union; that there was a genuine non-Jewish Communism there, just as there was in Poland during the 1980s:poland.html.
Convergence, my material shows, was a movement by Jews (Trotskyists and/or Zionists) to REGAIN control of the USSR by returning it to its Trotskyist period. At the same time, they would impose Trotskyist social policies in the West, including the destruction of the family: engagement.html. This is the gist of David Ben Gurion's prediction of how the world would be in 1987: bengur50.jpg. For a bigger image see bengur62.jpg.
For background on this see tmf.html.
To shift the USSR from "Stalinism" to "Trotskyism", they had to loosen the scrwws; in the process, they lost control there.
Isaac Deutscher wrote that the Bolshevik Government, in its first years, was run by "emigres had lived many years in the West", who looked down on Russian "backwardness" and pursued "internationalist" politics:
"... they were Marxists in partibus infidelium, West European revolutionaries acting against a non-congenial Oriental background, which ... tried to impose its tyranny upon them. Only revolution in the West could relieve them from that tyranny ... "
"No sooner had Bolshevism mentally withdrawn into its national shell than this attitude became untenable. The party of the revolution had to stoop to its semi-Asiatic environment. It had to cut itself loose from the specifically Western tradition of Marxism ... "
Beria and Gorbachev attempted to return to this "Western" Marxism: each emphatically rejected Stalin. But Deutscher was a Jewish Trotskytist, and this "Western" Marxism is Trotskyism by another name: beria.html.
{end}
(12) Another Jewish Communist comes out as a Neocon ... in the Murdoch press. But Albert Langer insists he still represents the "Left"
May Day - it's the festival of the distressed
By shifting the argument to one about democracy and liberation, Dubya has done the right (Left) thing on Iraq. Meanwhile, the pseudo-Left just about got everything wrong, claims Vietnam War activist Albert Langer
The Australian
May 1, 2003 {by Albert Langer}
THE Left tide that rose worldwide in the 1960s subsided in the '70s, just as the previous tides from the '30s and '40s subsided in the '50s.
There was no significant Left upsurge in the '80s or '9Os, partly because reactionary forces were already on the retreat, with the liberation of southern Africa, East Timor and Eastem Europe the creation of the Palestinian Authority and the shift from military to parliamentary rule throughout Latin America, the Philippines and Indonesia.
When the left tide is rising, May Day provides an opportunity to sum up past victorles and preview the revolutionary "festival of the oppressed" to come. When the tide is low or dropping, as now, Mayday is just the international distress call - a cry for help.
For more than two decades, the genuine Left has been swamped by a, Left whose hostility to capitalism is reactionary rather than progressive. The pseudo-Left opposes modernity, development, globalisation, technology and progress.
It embraces obscurantism, relativism, romanticism and even nature worship. At May Day rallies, the pseudo-Left whines about how things aren't what they used to be.
The real Left has been marginalised, debating neither the neo-cons nor the pseudo-Left, simply because there has been no audience for that debate. Incoherent nonsense from complete imbeciles is published as "Left" comment in newspapers just so right-wing commentators can pretend they have something intelligent to say. In fact "Left" is used as a euphemism for "pessimistic", "unimaginative" and just plain "dull".
But now there is an audience. The war in Iraq has woken people everywhere - and the pseudo Left has really blown its chance.
Millions who marched in mid February stopped marching two months later, as soon as the argument shifted towards democratising and liberating the Iraqi people. Those millions still agree that George W. Bush is an arrogant bully, but they no longer believe the peacemongers have got it right. People want to figure out what is going on and are joining the debate at websites such as www.lastsuperpower. net.
For months, the argument was about weapons of mass destruction and the role of the UN. If the demands of the US, and the UN, had been fully met, Saddam Hussein could have lived happily, and the Iraqi people miserably, for ever after.
But look at what happened next! Suddenly we were hearing a different song. Bush has been making the argument not for disarming Iraq but for liberating Iraq.
Stripped of the "God bless America" stuff, the US President's case now goes like this:
"If we devote our resources to draining the swamps, addressing the roots of the 'campaigns of hatred', we can not only reduce the threats we face, but also live llp to ideals that we profess and that are not beyond reach if we choose to take hem seriously."
Actually, those words are from Noam Chomsky two days before Bush's UN speech on September 10, 2002.
But if Bush had adopted Chomsky's position so early, that would have prevented congressional authorisation. Such a position threatens to destabilise despotic, reactionary regimes everywhere. But those in the US foreign policy establishment have devoted their entire careers to supporting the most corrupt tyrannies in the Middle East, in the name of "stability".
For Chomsky, "draining the swamps" apparently didn't include killing people and blowing things up. Fortunately, Bush is made of sterner stuff.
Both Bush and Chomsky know the US cannot be secure from medievalist terrorist mosqitoes while the Middle East remains a swamp. But Bush also knows that modernity grows out of the barrel of a gun.
That is a genuinely Left case for a revolutionary war of liberation, such as has occurred in Iraq. The pseudo Left replies: "That's illegal."
Well, of course revolutionary war is illegal. Legal systems are created by revolutions, not revolutions by legal systems.
The next logical step for the new policy is to establish a viable Palestinian state. Bush has put himself in a position where he can and must take that step. Naturally, he will not admit to the enormous strategic and policy retreat that such a step implies, so he has preceded it with enough triumphalist rhetoric to make even the Fox News team look queasy.
The revival of the Left in the '60s only began once it was widely noticed that the remnants of the previous movement were reactionaries obstructing progress. After it tried so hard to preserve fascism in Iraq, even after Bush Jr had wisely given up on Bush Sr's policy of keeping the Iraqi dictator in power, can anyone deny the pseudo-Left is reactionary?
Albert Langer is an unreconstructed Maoist (anarcho-Stalinist) ...
{end}
(13) A Trotskyist Website Responds
The historical roots of neoconservatism: a reply to a slanderous attack on Trotskyism
By Bill Vann 23 May 2003
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/may2003/shac-m23.shtml
The May 20 edition of the Spanish-language daily El Diario/La Prensa in New York City published a column by the newspaper's political editor Vicky Pelaez entitled "From permanent revolution to permanent conquest." The thrust of the piece is an attempt to trace the current policies of the extreme right-wing clique that dominates the Bush White House and the Pentagon to the American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s.
This article is by no means unique. A number of print and on-line publications ranging from the Sunday Times in Britain and El País in Spain to the web site antiwar.com and that of the John Birch Society have featured similar material. In some cases, these articles are motivated by internecine disputes within the American right. In other cases they represent a confused attempt to explain the eruption of US militarism that has developed under the Bush administration, and the role played in it by a tight-knit group of hard-right ideologues centered in the Pentagon.
Ms. Pelaez's column is distinguished only by the crudeness of the fabricated details that she employs to further her arguments. After tracing the undoubted influence of the right-wing German-born political scientist Leo Strauss (See: http://www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/stra-m26.shtml) upon many of those dubbed neoconservatives in the Bush administration, she proceeds to the alleged Trotskyist connection.
Pelaez writes: "But strangest of all is the political position of all those [Bush administration officials] cited above. The investigation reveals that the parents of all of them were Trotskyist militants, anti-Stalinists and belonged to the movement of the 1930s to the 40s that arose when Leon Trotsky abandoned the Soviet Union and denounced Stalin as a revisionist and a dictator. Of course, the United States supported with all its might the Trotskyist movement, which was spread worldwide; this included here in New York the CIA's organizing their congress at the Waldorf Astoria in 1949 (The CIA and the Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders.)"
She continues: "The children of the made-in-the-USA Trotskyists, their names are Wolfowitz, Perle, Kristol, Feith, David Wurmser, etc., became part of the liberal anticommunist movements between the 1950s and 70s. Later they converted themselves into neoconservatives and transformed Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution into Permanent Conquest based on Strauss. Then they put it into action after taking power, calling it Permanent Expansion, justifying it by saying that Ôeverything that is good for America is good for the world' and that Ôthe United States has the right to attack any country if it perceives the existence of any danger.'" ...
{end}
(14) Trotsky's ghost wandering the White House
Influence on Bush aides: Bolshevik's writings supported the idea of pre-emptive war
Jeet Heer
National Post, Saturday, June 07, 2003
http://www.majority.com/news/jeet1.html
Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator, was paranoid. Perhaps his deepest fears centred around his great rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik movement, Leon Trotsky. Stalin went to extraordinary lengths to obliterate not only Trotsky but also the ragtag international fellowship known as the Left Opposition, which supported Trotsky's political program. In the late 1920s, Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Communist Party and deported him from the Soviet Union. Almost instantly, other Communist parties moved to excommunicate Trotsky's followers, notably the Americans James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman.
In 1933, while in exile in Turkey, Trotsky regrouped his supporters as the Fourth International. Never amounting to more than a few thousand individuals scattered across the globe, the Fourth International was constantly harassed by Stalin's secret police, as well as by capitalist governments. The terrible purge trials that Stalin ordered in the late 1930s were designed in part to eliminate any remaining Trotskyists in the Soviet Union. Fleeing from country to country, Trotsky ended up in Mexico, where he was murdered by an ice-pick-wielding Stalinist assassin in 1940. Like Macbeth after the murder of Banquo, Stalin became even more obsessed with his great foe after killing him. Fearing a revival of Trotskyism, Stalin's secret police continued to monitor the activities of Trotsky's widow in Mexico, as well as the far-flung activities of the Fourth International. - - -
More than a decade after the demise of the Soviet Union, Stalin's war against Trotsky may seem like quaint ancient history. Yet Stalin was right to fear Trotsky's influence. Unlike Stalin, Trotsky was a man of genuine intellectual achievement, a brilliant literary critic and historian as well as a military strategist of genius. Trotsky's movement, although never numerous, attracted many sharp minds. At one time or another, the Fourth International included among its followers the painter Frida Kahlo (who had an affair with Trotsky), the novelist Saul Bellow, the poet André Breton and the Trinidadian polymath C.L.R. James.
As evidence of the continuing intellectual influence of Trotsky, consider the curious fact that some of the books about the Middle East crisis that are causing the greatest stir were written by thinkers deeply shaped by the tradition of the Fourth International.
In seeking advice about Iraqi society, members of the Bush administration (notably Paul D. Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defence, and Dick Cheney, the Vice-President) frequently consulted Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi-American intellectual whose book The Republic of Fear is considered to be the definitive analysis of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule.
As the journalist Christopher Hitchens notes, Makiya is "known to veterans of the Trotskyist movement as a one-time leading Arab member of the Fourth International." When speaking about Trotskyism, Hitchens has a voice of authority. Like Makiya, Hitchens is a former Trotskyist who is influential in Washington circles as an advocate for a militantly interventionist policy in the Middle East. Despite his leftism, Hitchens has been invited into the White House as an ad hoc consultant.
Other supporters of the Iraq war also have a Trotsky-tinged past. On the left, the historian Paul Berman, author of a new book called Terror and Liberalism, has been a resonant voice among those who want a more muscular struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. Berman counts the Trotskyist C.L.R. James as a major influence. Among neo-conservatives, Berman's counterpart is Stephen Schwartz, a historian whose new book,The Two Faces of Islam, is a key text among those who want the United States to sever its ties with Saudi Arabia. Schwartz spent his formative years in a Spanish Trotskyist group.
To this day, Schwartz speaks of Trotsky affectionately as "the old man" and "L.D." (initials from Trotsky's birth name, Lev Davidovich Bronstein). "To a great extent, I still consider myself to be [one of the] disciples of L.D," he admits, and he observes that in certain Washington circles, the ghost of Trotsky still hovers around. At a party in February celebrating a new book about Iraq, Schwartz exchanged banter with Wolfowitz about Trotsky, the Moscow Trials and Max Shachtman.
"I've talked to Wolfowitz about all of this," Schwartz notes. "We had this discussion about Shachtman. He knows all that stuff, but was never part of it. He's definitely aware." The yoking together of Paul Wolfowitz and Leon Trotsky sounds odd, but a long and tortuous history explains the link between the Bolshevik left and the Republican right.
To understand how some Trotskyists ended up as advocates of U.S. expansionism, it is important to know something about Max Shachtman, Trotsky's controversial American disciple. Shachtman's career provides the definitive template of the trajectory that carries people from the Left Opposition to support for the Pentagon.
Throughout the 1930s, Shachtman loyally hewed to the Trotsky line that the Soviet Union as a state deserved to be defended even though Stalin's leadership had to be overthrown. However, when the Soviet Union forged an alliance with Hitler and invaded Finland, Shachtman moved to a politics of total opposition, eventually known as the "third camp" position. Shachtman argued in the 1940s and 1950s that socialists should oppose both capitalism and Soviet communism, both Washington and Moscow.
Yet as the Cold War wore on, Shachtman became increasingly convinced Soviet Communism was "the greater and more dangerous" enemy. "There was a way on the third camp left that anti-Stalinism was so deeply ingrained that it obscured everything else," says Christopher Phelps, whose introduction to the new book Race and Revolution details the Trotskyist debate on racial politics. Phelps is an eloquent advocate for the position that the best portion of Shachtman's legacy still belongs to the left.
By the early 1970s, Shachtman was a supporter of the Vietnam War and the strongly anti-Communist Democrats such as Senator Henry Jackson. Shachtman had a legion of young followers (known as Shachtmanites) active in labour unions and had an umbrella group known as the Social Democrats. When the Shachtmanites started working for Senator Jackson, they forged close ties with hard-nosed Cold War liberals who also advised Jackson, including Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz; these two had another tie to the Trotskyism; their mentor was Albert Wohlstetter, a defence intellectual who had been a Schachtmanite in the late 1940s.
Shachtman died in 1972, but his followers rose in the ranks of the labour movement and government bureaucracy. Because of their long battles against Stalinism, Shachtmanites were perfect recruits for the renewed struggle against Soviet communism that started up again after the Vietnam War. Throughout the 1970s, intellectuals forged by the Shachtman tradition filled the pages of neo-conservative publications. Then in the 1980s, many Social Democrats found themselves working in the Reagan administration, notably Jeanne Kirkpatrick (who was ambassador to the United Nations) and Elliott Abrams (whose tenure as assistant secretary of state was marred by his involvement with the Iran-Contra scandal).
The distance between the Russia of 1917 and the Washington of 2003 is so great that many question whether Trotsky and Shachtman have really left a legacy for the Bush administration. For Christopher Phelps, the circuitous route from Trotsky to Bush is "more a matter of rupture and abandonment of the left than continuity."
Stephen Schwartz disagrees. "I see a psychological, ideological and intellectual continuity," says Schwartz, who defines Trotsky's legacy to neo-conservatism in terms of a set of valuable lessons. By his opposition to both Hitler and Stalin, Trotsky taught the Left Opposition the need to have a politics that was proactive and willing to take unpopular positions. "Those are the two things that the neo-cons and the Trotskyists always had in common: the ability to anticipate rather than react and the moral courage to stand apart from liberal left opinion when liberal left opinion acts like a mob."
Trotsky was also a great military leader, and Schwartz finds support for the idea of pre-emptive war in the old Bolshevik's writings. "Nobody who is a Trotskyist can really be a pacifist," Schwartz notes. "Trotskyism is a militaristic disposition. When you are Trotskyist, we don't refer to him as a great literary critic, we refer to him as the founder of the Red Army."
Paul Berman agrees with Schwartz that Trotskyists are by definition internationalists who are willing to go to war when necessary. "The Left Opposition and the non-Communist left comes out of classic socialism, so it's not a pacifist tradition," Berman observes. "It's an internationalist tradition. It has a natural ability to sympathize or feel solidarity for people in places that might strike other Americans or Canadians as extremely remote."
Christopher Phelps, however, doubts these claims of a Trotskyist tradition that would support the war in Iraq. For the Left Opposition, internationalism was not simply about fighting all over the world. "Internationalism meant solidarity with other peoples and not imperialist imposition upon them," Phelps notes.
Though Trotsky was a military leader, Phelps also notes "the Left Opposition had a long history of opposition to imperialist war. They weren't pacifists, but they were against capitalist wars fought by capitalist states. It's true that there is no squeamishness about the application of force when necessary. The question is, is force used on behalf of a class that is trying to create a world with much less violence or is it force used on behalf of a state that is itself the largest purveyor of organized violence in the world? There is a big difference." Seeing the Iraq war as an imperialist adventure, Phelps is confident "Trotsky and Shachtman in the '30s and '40s wouldn't have supported this war."
This dispute over the true legacy of Trotsky and Shachtman illustrates how the Left Opposition still stirs passion. The strength of a living tradition is in its ability to inspire rival interpretations. Despite Stalin's best efforts, Trotskyism is a living force that people fight over.
{end}
(15) Michael Lind vs Alan Wald on the Trotskyist tie to the Neocons
15.1 The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War
By Michael Lind
New Statesman - April 7, 2003
http://www.rense.com/general37/theweirdmenbehind.htm
... The core group now in charge consists of neoconservative defence intellectuals (they are called "neoconservatives" because many of them started off as anti-Stalinist leftists or liberals before moving to the far right). Inside the government, the chief defence intellectuals include Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defence. He is the defence mastermind of the Bush administration; Donald Rumsfeld is an elderly figurehead who holds the position of defence secretary only because Wolfowitz himself is too controversial. Others include Douglas Feith, the number three at the Pentagon; Lewis "Scooter" Libby, a Wolfowitz protege who is Cheney's chief of staff; John R Bolton, a right-winger assigned to the State Department to keep Colin Powell in check; and Elliott Abrams, recently appointed to head Middle East policy at the National Security Council. On the outside are James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has tried repeatedly to link both 9/11 and the anthrax letters in the US to Saddam Hussein, and Richard Perle, who has just resigned from his unpaid defence department advisory post after a lobbying scandal. Most of these "experts" never served in the military. But their headquarters is now the civilian defence secretary's office, where these Republican political appointees are despised and distrusted by the largely Republican career soldiers.
Most neoconservative defence intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti- communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy". They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neo-con defence intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the centre of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think- tanks, foundations and media empires. Think-tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) provide homes for neo-con "in-and- outers" when they are out of government (Perle is a fellow at AEI). The money comes not so much from corporations as from decades-old conservative foundations, such as the Bradley and Olin foundations, which spend down the estates of long-dead tycoons.Neoconservative foreign policy does not reflect business interests in any direct way. The neo-cons are ideologues, not opportunists.
The major link between the conservative think-tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defence experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired General Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he co-signed a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defence Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organisation of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist". While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborating with Perle, co-authored for Likud a policy paper that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidise Jewish settlements in the occupied territories.
The final corner of the neoconservative pentagon is occupied by several right-wing media empires, with roots - odd as it seems - in the Commonwealth and South Korea. Rupert Murdoch disseminates propaganda through his Fox Television network. His magazine the Weekly Standard, edited by William Kristol, the former chief of staff of Dan Quayle (vice-president, 1989-93), acts as a mouthpiece for defence intellectuals such as Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith and Woolsey as well as for Sharon's government. The National Interest (of which I was executive editor, 1991-94) is now funded by Conrad Black, who owns the Jerusalem Post and the Hollinger empire in Britain and Canada.
Strangest of all is the media network centred on the Washington Times - owned by the South Korean messiah (and ex-convict) the Reverend Sun Myung Moon - which owns the newswire UPI. UPI is now run by John O'Sullivan, the ghost-writer for Margaret Thatcher who once worked as an editor for Conrad Black in Canada. Through such channels, the "Gotcha!" style of right-wing British journalism, as well as its Europhobic substance, have contaminated the US conservative movement.
The corners of the neoconservative pentagon were linked together in the 1990s by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), run by Kristol out of the Weekly Standard offices. Using a PR technique pioneered by their Trotskyist predecessors, the neo-cons published a series of public letters, whose signatories often included Wolfowitz and other future members of the Bush foreign policy team. They called for the US to invade and occupy Iraq and to support Israel's campaigns against the Palestinians (dire warnings about China were another favourite). During Clinton's two terms, these fulminations were ignored by the foreign policy establishment and the mainstream media. Now they are frantically being studied.
How did the neo-con defence intellectuals - a small group at odds with most of the US foreign policy elite, Republican as well as Democratic - manage to capture the Bush administration? Few supported Bush during the presidential primaries. They feared that the second Bush would be like the first - a wimp who had failed to occupy Baghdad in the first Gulf war and who had pressured Israel into the Oslo peace process - and that his administration, again like his father's, would be dominated by moderate Republican realists such as Powell, James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. They supported the maverick senator John McCain until it became clear that Bush would get the nomination.
Then they had a stroke of luck - Cheney was put in charge of the presidential transition (the period between the election in November and the accession to office in January). Cheney used this opportunity to stack the administration with his hardline allies. Instead of becoming the de facto president in foreign policy, as many had expected, Secretary of State Powell found himself boxed in by Cheney's right-wing network, including Wolfowitz, Perle, Feith, Bolton and Libby.
The neo-cons took advantage of Bush's ignorance and inexperience. Unlike his father, a Second World War veteran who had been ambassador to China, director of the CIA and vice-president, George W was a thinly educated playboy who had failed repeatedly in business before becoming the governor of Texas, a largely ceremonial position (the state's lieutenant governor has more power). His father is essentially a north-eastern, moderate Republican; George W, raised in west Texas, absorbed the Texan cultural combination of machismo, anti-intellectualism and overt religiosity. The son of upper-class Episcopalian parents, he converted to southern fundamentalism in a midlife crisis. Fervent Christian Zionism, along with an admiration for macho Israeli soldiers that sometimes coexists with hostility to liberal Jewish-American intellectuals, is a feature of the southern culture. ...
15.2 Are Trotskyites Running the Pentagon?
by Alan Wald
http://hnn.us/articles/1514.html
6-23-03: News at Home
Mr. Wald is Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan.
As a scholar researching for several decades the migration of United States intellectuals from Left to Right, I have been startled by the large number of journalistic articles making exaggerated claims about ex-Trotskyist influence on the Bush administration that have been circulating on the internet and appearing in a range of publications. I first noticed these in March 2003, around the time that the collapse of Partsian Review magazine was announced, although some may have appeared earlier.
One of the most dismaying examples can be found in the caricatures presented in Michael Lind's "The Weird Men Behind George W. Bush's War" that appeared in the April 7, 2003 issue of the New Statesman. Lind states that U.S. foreign policy is now being formulated by a circle of "neoconservative defence intellectuals," and that "most " are "products of the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s...." Moreover, Lind claims that their current ideology of "Wilsonianism" is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism."
However, I am not aware that anyone in the group of "neoconservative defence intellectuals" cited by Mr. Lind has ever had an organizational or ideological association with Trotskyism, or with any other wing of the Far Left. Nor do I understand the implications of emphasizing the "Jewish" side of the formula, although many of these individuals may have diverse relations to the Jewish tradition--as do many leading U.S. critics of the recent war in Iraq. ...
True enough, after World War II, a number of one time Trotskyists, like others of their generation, moved in a conservative direction. The most notable, National Review supporters Max Eastman and James Burnham {seeburnham.html}, were neither Jewish nor neoconservative, although they advocated a Bush-like foreign policy. In the Cold War era, Sidney Hook, a sympathizer of Trotskyism in the mid-1930s, and Irving Kristol, a member of a Trotskyist faction ("Shermanites") in the late 1930s and early 1940s, became militant Cold Warriors. Although both were deradicalized before the 1960s, these two are much identified with the original neoconservatism of the 1970s. However, Kristol's son, William, now editor of the influential Weekly Standard, was never on the Far Left, let alone associated with Trotskyism. Likewise, Elliot Cohen, who foundedCommentary in 1946, had been a Trotskyist sympathizer in the early 1930s. But neither his eventual successor, one-time liberal Norman Podhoretz, nor Podhoretz's son, John, had any such Marxist proclivities.
Equally misleading is the glib equation of the defense intellectuals' "Wilsonianism" with Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution. Whatever the relevance of Trotsky's theory might be today, the original idea addressed the relationship of class forces in the economically underdeveloped world. It was Trotsky's strategy for escaping from Western domination, not expanding it, and the argument was that poor countries could only become genuinely independent by breaking radically with the "free market," not by embracing it. Any association with current "Wilsonianism" is far-fetched.
I certainly agree with Mr. Lind that we need to find out "Who is making foreign policy?" and "what are they trying to achieve?" But his amalgamation of the defense intellectuals with the traditions and theories of "the largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement " is singularly unhelpful.
Editor's Note
Several individuals have asked about the relation of "Shermanites" to "Shachtmanites" in Alan Wald's piece about alleged Trotskyists among the "Defense Intellectuals." Wald replies:
"Sherman" was the Party name of of PHILIP SELZNICK (born Philip Shachter in 1919). He became a young Trotskyist around 1937 and joined Max Shachtman's Workers Party (WP) when it split from the Socialist Workers party in 1940. Opposed to Shachtman, Selznick immediately organized a faction within the WP known as the "Shermanites." Supporters of the Shermanites included Selznick, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Seymour Martin Lipset, Marvin Meyers, Peter Rossi, Martin Diamond, Herbert Garfinkel, Jeremiah Kaplan, and Irving Kristol--all of whom became well known as historians, social scientists, and publishers. Both the young Irving Howe and Max Shachtman himself vigorously opposed the Shermanites in various debates. Among other things, the Shermanite group considered itself revolutionary but "anti-Bolshevik," which complicates a simple view of them as "Trotskyists."
The Shermanite grouping quickly left the WP and published the magazine ENQUIRY from 1942 to 1945. A full set of the journal has been reprinted, and abundant documentation about the faction exists. Selznick himself became a Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and was a supporter of the Free Speech Movement.
15.3 I Was Smeared, By Michael Lind
Mr. Lind is Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation.
http://hnn.us/articles/1530.html
Last week HNN published Alan Wald's critique of an article written by Michael Lind for the New Statesman in which Mr. Lind argued that defense policy in the Bush administration is orchestrated by a group of people, many of whom are Jewish, who were allegedly shaped by Trotskyism. This week we publish an exchange between Mr. Lind and Mr. Wald. Below is Mr. Lind's statement. Click here for Mr. Wald's.
I thank Mr. Wald for helping to prove my case. Indeed, the details he provides suggest that the existence of the influence of ex-Trotskyists, Shermanite and Schachtmannite alike, on the neoconservative faction within American conservatism was even greater than I and others have realized. It is not every day that an incompetent critic unwittingly undermines his own case in attempting to refute yours.
I stand by the observation that there is a distinct Trotskyist political culture, which shows its residual influence even on individuals who renounced Trotskyism or who were never Trotskyists but inherited this political culture from their parents or older mentors. An unusual belligerence in foreign policy combined with a desire to export "revolution" (first socialist, and then, among ex-Trotskyists who move to the liberal center or the Right, the "global democratic revolution" in the phrase of Schachtmannites like Joshua Muravchik) distinguishes these ex-Trots and inheritors of ex-Trot political culture from other kinds of conservatives and liberals--for example, Anglo-Catholic Tories, Rooseveltian New Deal liberal internationalists, and Buchanan-style isolationists. Not only in the U.S. but in Britain and continental Europe, ex-Trots have tended to go from advocating promotion of socialist revolution to promoting liberal or democratic revolution. This is a minor but genuine feature of the trans-Atlantic political landscape that is so familiar, and commented upon so often by members of the foreign policy elite, not only in the U.S. but in Britain and France, that it surprises me to learn that anyone claims it is controversial. ...
Not only I but most students of the political culture of neoconservatism, including many neoconservatives themselves, have described the various influences that distinguish this branch of the Right from others: influences including not only the vestiges of Trotskyist foreign policy activism, but also Straussianism, Cold War liberalism, and a peculiar kind of Anglophilia based on the veneration of Winston Churchill, who is far more popular among American neocons than Franklin Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson. (Even neocons like Max Boot who claim to be "Wilsonians" never quote a line from Woodrow Wilson, and nothing could be less Wilsonianism than their militaristic rhetoric about "empire," which actually derives from their idealized vision of the British empire, not from anything in the resolutely anti-imperial American political tradition). Can one identify individual neoconservatives who were not influenced by Trotskyism, Straussianism, Cold War liberalism, the myth of Churchill, and the mystique of the British empire? Certainly. Does that mean that anyone who mentions any of these influences is therefore an unscholarly conspiracy theorist, of the kind Mr. Wald accuses me of being? Oh, please.
The Straussian movement split long ago into "East Coast Straussians" and "West Coast Straussians." In addition, there are a few neoconservatives who know little or nothing about Leo Strauss. A defender of the neoconservatives as intellectually dishonest as Mr. Wald could use these facts in denouncing any scholar or journalist who mentions the influence of Straussianism on the distinctive political culture of the neoconservative faction of the Republican Party. If he were as disingenuous as Mr. Wald, he could argue that since there are East and West Coast Straussians, Straussianism therefore does not exist, and anyone who talks about a distinctive Straussian intellectual culture, or Straussian influence on neoconservatism is a) unscholarly and b) a paranoid conspiracy theorist who probably believes that the Shriners control the Council on Foreign Relations.
... Mr. Wald says not only that neoconservative originated as a pejorative used by Michael Harrington (true, if irrelevant) but that there never really were any self-identified "neoconservatives" (false). This line that there never really were any neoconservatives has long been used by Irving Kristol in interviews. I used to laugh about it with other of Kristol's employees. The non-existence of neoconservatism, except in the minds of conspiracy-mongers, certainly would have come as news to me and my fellow neoconservatives when I worked for Kristol and attended conferences and dinner parties with Gertrude Himmelfarb, Bill Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Peter Berger, and other self-conscious neocons. Unaware that we were not supposed to exist, according to Mr. Wald, we neocons were well aware of the shared views on the Cold War, race, and other topics that distinguished us from the Buckley Tories and the Buchananite Old Right. If Mr. Wald knew more about the neoconservative intellectual network of the 1980s and 1990s, as opposed to the long-defunct Workers' Party of the 1930s, he would know that there was a bitter war in the conservative press between "neoconservatives" (many of them former Trotskyists, as he has confirmed) who reluctantly or enthusiastically accepted the term to describe themselves and the "Old Right" of Patrick Buchanan. ...
One final point. For pointing out what every history of the subject takes for granted, that the Trotskyist movement was largely though not exclusively Jewish in membership, defenders of the neocons (not, interestingly, any present-day Trotskyists!) have hinted that I am an anti-semite (they don't know, or don't care, that I am partly Jewish in descent). This has come as no surprise to me--anyone who criticizes neoconservative influence on U.S. foreign policy is quickly vilified by the gutter journalists--and the gutter professors--of neoconservatism as an anti-semite, a traitor, an appeaser, an enemy in "the culture war," or a combination of two or more of the four. Since HNN, to its discredit, has seen fit to publish several such smears against me on its website [click here and here ], I would like to make one point, not so much in my defense--I have nothing to be defensive about--but in defense of scholarly freedom from intimidation and self-censorship, where ethnic or regional sensitivities are concerned.
Analysis of the role of ethnic and regional groups in U.S. politics is standard in political science, and it is not evidence of hostility toward the ethnic groups or the regions being analyzed. Indeed, this seems to be accepted by neocons in most cases. Not a single one of the critics who professes to be disturbed by my mention in passing of the Jewish role in American Trotskyism has objected to my repeated observations in print that the Southern Religious Right reflects the political culture of the Scots-Irish, with its historic links to Protestant Northern Ireland. Why not? Aren't both points equally illegitimate, in their eyes? Why has no neoconservative angrily written a screed claiming that "Michael Lind's allusion to a supposed connection between Scots-Irish ethnicity and Southern Protestant fundamentalism proves not only that he is a conspiracy theorist but hates the Scots-Irish as well!" (For the record, I am partly Scots-Irish, as well as partly Jewish, in descent).
The list of Shermanites that Mr. Wald gives is disproportionately Jewish in membership, although he does not say so. If Mr. Wald had actually used the phrase the "disproportionately Jewish Shermanite movement," would this have made him, not only a conspiracy theorist (after all, did Shermanism ever really exist, except in the imaginations of conspiracy theorists like Wald?) but an anti-semite as well? What about the mere act of drawing up and publishing a list, the majority of whose members are Jewish? Seems kind of creepy, come to think of it. Is Mr. Wald's creepy list the product of a sinister, conspiratorial imagination? Has he tried to smear all Jewish-Americans, tarring them by association with a supposed "Shermanite" conspiracy? Perhaps someone should alert the Anti-Defamation League to Mr. Wald's disturbing comments...
I encourage interested readers to read my essays and books on the subject of the American Right--essays and books in which my chief focus is on the Southern Protestant Right, without whose electoral clout neocons (including former Schachtmannites and former Shermanites and their progeny) would have no influence at all on U.S. foreign or domestic policy. The readers of HNN should not trust dishonest misrepresentations of my statements and views on the part of apologists for neoconservatism.
Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot. Neoconservatism does not exist and never has. And there was no such thing as Trotskyism, either.
{end}
15.4 Who Is Smearing Whom?
6-30-03: News at Home
http://hnn.us/articles/1536.html
Mr. Wald, Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan, is the author of The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left (1987), and other books about radical culture in the United States.
After four months, Michael Lind is still unable to produce even one piece of credible evidence to prove the exaggerated and unhelpful claims made in his widely-quoted New Statesman article of April 7th. So he issues a lengthy rant discussing a wide range of other matters. Some of his new arguments are too general to be controversial. Other statements, perplexingly, are attributed to me even though they are nowhere to be found in my critique of his original essay. ...
My objection to Mr. Lind's argument is first of all that he gave no evidence that "most" of this "small clique" that is "in charge" of U.S. foreign policy has any significant connection, personal or ideological, to what he calls the "largely Jewish-American Trotskyist movement." In his answer to my critique, Mr. Lind still refuses to provide documentation of such a sensational charge. Instead, he attributes to himself a different claim: "I stand by the observation that there is a distinct Trotskyist political culture, which shows residual influence on individuals who renounced Trotskyism or who were never Trotskyists but inherited this political culture from their parents or older mentors." But nowhere does he show us how a single member of the "small clique" either "renounced Trotskyism" or "inherited this political culture" from anyone.
I would be the last person to dispute that the political cultures of Trotskyism, Communism, anarchism, New Deal Liberalism, etc., can exist and be transmitted. For example, in regard to Trotskyism, it can be demonstrated that critiques of Stalinism from Marxist premises, a sympathy for the radical potential of literary modernism, and an internationalist view of Jewish identity together comprise a subcultural tradition that might be passed on. One might even write a whole book about the subject. (We might call it, "The New York Intellectuals: The Rise and Decline of the Anti-Stalinist Left.") Moreover, such a study would point out that the original group coalescing as "neoconservatives" in the 1970s included a few prominent intellectuals who had passed through a wing of the Trotskyist movement, especially an anti-Shachtmanite tendency known as the "Shermanites" (led by Philip Selznik, aka Sherman). But even in the 1970s, among the strands of ideological DNA that formed to create "Neoconservatism," Trotskyism was very much a receding one. Now, thirty years later, in regard to a group of mostly younger people that some are also calling "Neoconservatives," it is close to non-existent.
What about the claims of influence on foreign policy? In his second paragraph, Mr. Lind cites as his main example the phrase "global democratic revolution," which he attributes to "Schachmanites [sic] like Joshua Muravchik." Well, giving Trotskyism credit for a vague slogan like "global democratic revolution" is about as meaningful as the earlier claim that it was Trotskyists who "pioneered" the technique of sending out public letters. But at least Mr. Lind has now given us the name of an individual, albeit not one of the original "small clique" of "neocon defence intellectuals," to whom he affirms a Trotskyist connection. However, is Mr. Lind accurate in stating so unabashedly that Muravchik, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is currently, or ever was, a "Shachtmanite"? Here is what Muravchik wrote in in the Weekly Standard (Aug. 28, 2000) in his review of Maurice Isserman's biography of Michael Harrington: "Any number of those singled out in Isserman's book as 'Shachtmanites' had never been among them--including Penn Kemble, Bayard Rustin, and me.... To be sure, when in the mid-1960s I joined the Socialist party, I loved Shachtman's lectures, but what I learned from them had nothing to do with the Trotskyite arcana that had once been the substance of Shachtmanism. It had everything to do with the evil nature of communism." This statement is further proof that Mr. Lind is not to be trusted when he starts throwing around political labels, no matter how confident he sounds. Among Lind's "core" list of "neocon defence intellectuals," I doubt that any of them ever had as much personal exposure to Shachtman and his ideas as did Murachivik. Of course, an individual such as William Kristol may may well have learned about "the evil nature of communism" at the knee of father Irving, but this hardly makes the son a carrier of the Trotkyist virus. The point is that, unless we are to revert to the principle of "guilt by association," the connection between the individual and the political culture of Trotskyism must have some real substance to it.
Mr. Lind, fortunately, has now stopped referring to "Permanent Revolution," a theory that turns out to have nothing in common with the definition he originally ascribed to it. But he insists on a connection between a Trotskyist plan to "export 'revolution' " and the Bush foreign policy of invading Third World countries. True enough, following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Trotsky was reluctant to sign an unfavorable peace agreement with Germany because he favored promoting a socialist revolution there, a position that he later repudiated. But when Irving Kristol et al became Trotskyists in the late 1930s, there was no country in the world that that their tendency supported. What was meant by "revolution" was not the attack of one state on another, but bottom up social upheaval of the population. The documents of the Workers Party or the Shermanites make no reference to advocacy of intervention by any states to topple a regime and restructure society.
Utopian as their dreams might seem today, they believed the source of revolution to be a "Third Camp" of working people, not warring governments. Moreover, while I think that the Trotskyist movement in the United States has been for all practical purposes dead for decades, and is unlikely to play a part in any future radicalizations, the Trotskyist record of supporting "self-determination" of Palestinians and other oppressed populations is sterling in comparison to "Wilsonians" -- including those who put the mantle of "genuine American" on themselves.
Much of Mr. Lind's polemic is directed at issues and arguments never mentioned by me, although he gives no other attributions and cites me frequently. For example, Mr. Lind states with glee that "Mr. Wald says not only that neoconservatives originated as a pejorative used by Michael Harrington...but there never really were any self-identified neoconservatives (false)." Mr. Lind then devotes a long paragraph to mocking me with anecdotes about his dinner parties with "Bill" Kristol, Jeane Kirkpatrick, et al. The problem is that nowhere in my short article do I mention the name of Harrington or claim that the neocons didn't identify themselves as such! Ditto for all the stuff about whether or not Mr. Lind is an anti-Semite (although his "proof" that he can't possibly be an anti-Semite simply because he is "partly Jewish in descent" is both amusing and unsettling), conspiracy theories, the southern religious Right, and so on.
Mr. Lind defends his unsubstantiated argument about the political history and outlook of the "core group now in charge" of U.S. foreign policy by affirming that "it is impossible ... to write either history or political journalism without generalizations." True enough. But generalizations about "core groups" have to be derived from meticulous primary research into the biographies, ideas, and activities of the individuals about whom one is generalizing. For example, based on careful research, I believe that a generalization regarding "Shachtmanite" influences could be offered in regard to the "core group" that founded a publication such as Dissent magazine. But I do not believe such a generalization can apply to the core group that runs the Weekly Standard, let alone "the neocon defence intellectuals." I think it is questionable to even claim that this particular "core group" is truly "in charge" of foreign policy; and I think it is unconscionable to preach to the American public in potboiler articles the falsehood that there has been an ideological highjacking of their inexperienced president by a "weird" clique whose roots are "Jewish-American" and "Trotskyist." ...
{end}
(16) Noam Chomsky and the Trots as Gatekeepers for the Jewish lobbies
The driving force behind Zionism is not race or nationalism but religion. Even atheistic Jews like David Ben Gurion uphold Jewish messianism, and derive that vision from the Bible: tmf.html.
Chomsky and the Trotskyists, by rejecting all motives but materialistic ones, divert from the recognition of the true causes, and thus the means of dealing with them.
Israel Shahak's book Jewish History, Jewish Religion discloses the danger of the Jewish religion: shahak1.html.
On the front cover of the book is an endorsement by Noam Chomsky:
"Shahak is an outstanding scholar, with remarkable insight and depth of knowledge. His work is informed and penetrating, a contribution of great value".
Chomsky, on his website, says that Shahak is one of the friends with whom he exchanged newspaper clippings. He also has high praise for Norman Finkelstein.
In Chomsky's archive, a search for the word "shahak", and for the word "finkelstein", shows that Shahak and Norman Finkelstein appear in about 5 or 6 essays each.
Chomsky's references to Shahak deal with Shahak's work against American and Israeli imperialism. Chomsky never once mentions Shahak's theory about religion being an important factor.
Similarly with Norman Finkelstein, who wrote a book called The Holocauast Industry: finkelstein.html. Chomsky, at his website, despite praising Finkelstein as a Left activist, never once mentions the expression "holocaust industry".
Chomsky's archive is at  http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/index.cfm.
I used to think that the spreading war and chaos in the Middle East would eventually be blamed on Israel, and that as a result Hitler's sins would be relativized, put in perspective.
But now it's clear that the Jewish lobbies behind the wars are hiding themselves from view. Thus any wars will be blamed on the Anglo-American Empire, rather than the Jewish lobbies operating as back-seat drivers.
In view of the role of Jewish lobbies in promoting the war on Iraq, and the ongoing war on the Palestinians, it seems unfair that "holocaust reparations" are still being paid exclusively, to those lobbies, as a sort of blackmail, whereas the Palestinians get no compensation, likewise the Ukranian victims of the famine get none, the victims of the Rwandan genocide get none ... no-one but Jews get this sort of payment.
The European Court of Human Rights has found against Roger Garaudy, a leading French Communist expelled from the Party for criticising the USSR. It found that his anti-Zionist book The Mythical Foundations of Israeli Policy is "racist", seeks to "rehabilitate the National Socialist regime", and "had a clear racist objective": garaudy.html.
This is scary, because Garaudy was never pro-Hitler. Who has imposed such laws? Those who regularly complain of "antisemitism" seem responsible for this totalitarian drift. We've been conditioned to react in a Pavlovian way to the word "antisemitic", even though there's no similar reaction to anti-Christian or anti-Islamic speech, nor are there even standardized words for such sentiments.
Jeffrey Blankfort shows in the following article that Chomsky is a gatekeeper, diverting attention from the dominance the Jewish lobby exerts over US Governments.
The same applies to the Trotskyists who run the anti-war demonstrations. Even though religion was clearly a factor in Sharon's visit to the Temple site of September 28, 2000, the Trots always omit it at their political rallies.
CNN: http://www.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/meast/09/28/jerusalem.violence.02/
The second Intifada  Cairo Times, Volume 4, Issue 31, 12 - 18 October 2000 http://www.cairotimes.com/content/archiv04/jerusalem.html
"The violence was sparked after Likud leader Ariel Sharon visited the area around Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 28 September accompanied by 1000 armed policemen, including riot forces carrying clubs and plastic shields."
The Israel Lobby and the Left: Uneasy Questions
By Jeffrey Blankfort
Left Curve, No. 27 http://www.leftcurve.org/LC27WebPages/IsraelLobby.html
It was 1991 and Noam Chomsky had just finished a lecture in Berkeley on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and was taking questions from the audience. An Arab-American asked him to explain his position regarding the influence of America's Israel lobby.
Chomsky replied that its reputation was generally exaggerated and, like other lobbies, it only appears to be powerful when its position lines up with that of the "elites" who determine policy in Washington. Earlier in the evening, he had asserted that Israel received support from the United States as a reward for the services it provides as the US's "cop-on-the-beat"in the Middle East.
Chomsky's response drew a warm round of applause from members of the audience who were no doubt pleased to have American Jews absolved from any blame for Israel's oppression of the Palestinians, then in the fourth year of their first Intifada.
What is noteworthy is that Chomsky's explanation for the financial and political support that the U.S. has provided Israel over the years is shared by what is generically known as the Israel lobby, and almost no one else.
Well, not quite "almost no one." Among the exceptions are the overwhelming majority of both houses of Congress and the mainstream media and, what is equally noteworthy, virtually the entire American Left, both ideological and idealistic, including the organizations ostensibly in the forefront of the fight for Palestinian rights.
That there is a meeting of the minds on this issue between supporters of Israel and the Left may help explain why the Palestine support movement within the United States has been an utter failure.
Chomsky's position on the lobby had been established well before that Berkeley evening. In The Fateful Triangle, published in 1983, he assigned it little weight:
{quote} The "special relationship" is often attributed to domestic political pressures, in particular the effectiveness of the American Jewish community in political life and in influencing opinion. While there is some truth to this it underestimates the scope of the "support for Israel, "and it overestimates the role of political pressure groups in decision making. (p.13) [1] {endquote}
A year earlier, Congress had applauded Israel's devastating invasion of Lebanon, and then appropriated millions in additional aid to pay for the shells the Israeli military had expended. How much of this support was due to the legislators' "support for Israel "and how much was due to pressures from the Israel lobby? It was a question that should have been examined by the left at the time, but wasn't. Twenty years later, Chomsky's view is still the "conventional wisdom."
In 2001, in the midst of the second intifada, he went further, arguing that "it is improper - particularly in the United States - to condemn ÎIsraeli atrocities,' "and that the "US/Israel-Palestine conflict" is the more correct term, comparable with placing the proper responsibility for "Russian-backed crimes in Eastern Europe [and] US-backed crimes in Central America." And, to emphasize the point, he wrote, "IDF helicopters are US helicopters with Israeli pilots."[2]
Prof. Stephen Zunes, who might be described as a Chomsky acolyte, would not only relieve Israeli Jews from any responsibility for their actions, he would have us believe they are the victims.
In Tinderbox, his widely praised (by Chomsky and others) new book on the Middle East, Zunes faults the Arabs for "blaming Israel, Zionism, or the Jews for their problems." According to Zunes, the Israelis have been forced to assume a role similar to that assigned to members of the Jewish ghettos of Eastern Europe who performed services, mainly tax collection, as middlemen between the feudal lords and the serfs in earlier times. In fact, writes Zunes, "US policy today corresponds with this historic anti-Semitism."[3] Anyone comparing the relative power of the Jewish community in centuries past with what we find in the US today will find that statement absurd.
Jewish power has, in fact, been trumpeted by a number of Jewish writers, including one, J. J. Goldberg, editor of the Jewish weekly Forward, who wrote a book by that name in 1996.[4] Any attempt, however, to explore the issue from a critical standpoint, inevitably leads to accusations of anti-Semitism, as Bill and Kathy Christison pointed out in their article on the role of right-wing Jewish neo-cons in orchestrating US Middle East policy, in Counterpunch (1/25/03):
{quote} Anyone who has the temerity to suggest any Israeli instigation of, or even involvement in, Bush administration war planning is inevitably labeled somewhere along the way as an anti-Semite. Just whisper the word "domination" anywhere in the vicinity of the word "Israel," as in "U.S.-Israeli domination of the Middle East" or "the U.S. drive to assure global domination and guarantee security for Israel," and some leftist, who otherwise opposes going to war against Iraq, will trot out charges of promoting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the old czarist forgery that asserted a Jewish plan for world domination.[5] {endquote}
Presumably, this is what Zunes would call an example of the "latent anti-Semitism which has come to the fore with wildly exaggerated claims of Jewish economic and political power."[6] And that it "is a naive asumption to believe that foreign policy decision-making in the US is pluralistic enough so that any one lobbying groups can have so much influence."[7]
This is hardly the first time that Jews have been in the upper echelons of power, as Benjamin Ginsberg points out in The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State; but there has never been a situation anything like the present. This was how Ginzberg began his book:
{quote} Since the 1960s, Jews have come to wield considerable influence in American economic, cultural, intellectual and political life. Jews played a central role in American finance during the 1980s, and they were among the chief beneficiaries of that decade's corporate mergers and reorganizations. Today, though barely 2 % of the nation's population is Jewish, close to half its billionaires are Jews. The chief executive officers of the three major television networks and the four largest film studios are Jews, as are the owners of the nation's largest newspaper chain and the most influential single newspaper, the New York Times.[8] {endquote} {ginsberg.html}
That was written in 1993. Today, ten years later, ardently pro-Israel American Jews are in positions of unprecedented influence within the United States and have assumed or been given decision-making positions over virtually every segment of our culture and body politic. This is no secret conspiracy. Regular readers of the New York Times business section, which reports the comings and goings of the media tycoons, are certainly aware of it. Does this mean that each and every one is a pro-Israel zealot? Not necessarily, but when one compares the US media with its European counterparts in their respective coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the extreme bias in favor of Israel on the part of the US media is immediately apparent.
This might explain Eric Alterman's discovery that "Europeans and Americans differ profoundly in their views of the Israel/Palestine issue at both the elite and popular levels, with Americans being far more sympathetic to Israel and the Europeans to the Palestinian cause"[9]
An additonal component of Chomsky's analysis is his insistence that it is the US, more than Israel, that is the "rejectionist state," implying that were it not for the US, Israel might long ago have abandoned the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians for a mini-state.
Essential to his analysis is the notion that every US administration since that of Eisenhower has attempted to advance Israel's interests in line with America's global and regional agenda. This is a far more complex issue than Chomsky leads us to believe. Knowledgeable insiders, both critical and supportive of Israel, have described in detail major conflicts that have taken place between US and Israeli administrations over the years in which Israel, thanks to the diligence of its domestic lobby, has usually prevailed.
In particular, Chomsky ignores or misinterprets the efforts made by every US president, beginning with Richard Nixon, to curb Israel's expansionism, to halt its settlement building and to obtain its withdrawal from the Occupied Territories.[10]
"What happened to all those nice plans?" asked Israeli journalist and peace activist Uri Avnery. "Israel's governments mobilized the collective power of US Jewry - which dominates Congress and the media to a large degree - against them. Faced by this vigorous opposition, all the presidents; great and small, football players and movie stars - folded, one after another."[11]
Gerald Ford, angered that Israel had been reluctant to leave the Sinai following the 1973 war and backed by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, not only suspended aid for six months in 1975, but in March of that year made a speech calling for a "reassessment" of the US-Israel relationship. Within weeks, AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), Israel's Washington lobby, secured a letter signed by 76 senators "confirming their support for Israel, and suggesting that the White House see fit to do the same. The language was tough, the tone almost bullying." Ford backed down.[12]
We need to only look at the current Bush presidency to see that this phenomenon is still the rule. In 1991, the same year as Chomsky's talk, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir asked the first Bush administartion for $10 billion in loan guarantees in order, he said, to provide for the resettlement of Russian Jews. Bush Sr. had earlier balked at a request from Congress to appropriate an additional $650 million dollars to compensate Israel for sitting out the Gulf War, but gave in when he realized that his veto would be overridden. But now he told Shamir that Israel could only have the guarantees if it freezes settlement building and promised that no Russian Jews would be resettled in the West Bank.
An angry Shamir refused and called on AIPAC to mobilize Congress and the organized American Jewish community in support of the loans guarantees. A letter, drafted by AIPAC was signed by more than 240 members of the House demanding that Bush approve them, and 77 senators signed on to supporting legislation.
On September 12, 1991, Jewish lobbyists descended on Washington in such numbers that Bush felt obliged to call a televised press conference in which he complained that "1000 Jewish lobbyists are on Capitol Hill against little old me." It would prove to be his epitaph. Chomsky pointed to Bush's statement, at the time, as proof that the vaunted Israel lobby was nothing more than "a paper tiger. It took scarcely more than a raised eyebrow for the lobby to collapse, "he told readers of Z Magazine. He could not have been further from the truth.[13]
The next day, Tom Dine, AIPAC's Executive Director, declared that "September 12, 1991 is a day that will live in infamy." Similar comments were uttered by Jewish leaders, who accused Bush of provoking anti-Semitism. What was more important, his friends in the mainstream media, like William Safire, George Will, and Charles Krauthammer, not only criticized him; they began to find fault with the economy and how he was running the country. It was all downhill from there. Bush's Jewish vote, which has been estimated at 38% in 1988, dropped down to no more than 12%, with some estimates as low as 8%.[14]
Bush's opposition to the loan guarantees was the last straw for the Israel lobby. When he made disparaging comments about Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem in March, 1990, AIPAC had begun the attack (briefly halted during the the Gulf War). Dine wrote a critical op-ed in the New York Times and followed that with a vigorous speech to the United Jewish Appeal's Young Leaders Conference. "Brothers and sisters,"he told them as they prepared to go out and lobby Congress on the issue, "remember that Israel's friends in this city reside on Capitol Hill."[15] Months later, the loan guarantees were approved, but by then Bush was dead meat.
Now, jump ahead to last Spring, when Bush Jr. forthrightly demanded that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon withdraw his marauding troops from Jenin, saying "Enough is enough!"It made headlines all over the world, as did his backing down when Sharon refused. What happened? Harsh criticism boomed from within his own party in Congress and from his daddy's old friends in the media. George Will associated Dubya with Yasser Arafat and accused Bush of having lost his "moral clarity."[16] The next day, Safire suggested that Bush was "being pushed into a minefield of mistakes"and that he had "become a wavering ally as Israel fights for suvival."[17] Junior got the message and, within a week, declared Sharon to be "a man of peace."[18] Since then, as journalist Robert Fisk and others have noted, Sharon seems to be writing Bush's speeches.
There are some who believe that Bush Jr. and Presidents before him made statements critical of Israel for appearances only, to convince the world, and the Arab countries in particular, that the US can be an "honest broker" between the Israelis and the Palestinians. But it is difficult to make a case that any of them would put themselves in a position to be humiliated simply as a cover for US policy.
A better explanation was provided by Stephen Green, whose Taking Sides, America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel, was the first examination of State Department archives concerning US-Israel relations. Since the Eisenhower administration, wrote Green in 1984, "Israel, and friends of Israel in America, have determined the broad outlines of US policy in the region. It has been left to American Presidents to implement that policy, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, and to deal with the tactical issues."[19]
A slight exaggeration, perhaps, but former US Senator James Abourezk (D-South Dakota) echoed Green's words in a speech before the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee last June:
{quote} That is the state of American politics today. The Israeli lobby has put together so much money power that we are daily witnessing US senators and representatives bowing down low to Israel and its US lobby.
Make no mistake. The votes and bows have nothing to do with the legislators' love for Israel. They have everything to do with the money that is fed into their campaigns by members of the Israeli lobby. My estimate is thatat least $6 billion flows from the American Treasury to Israel each year. That money, plus the political support the US gives Israel at the United Nations, is what allows Israel to conduct criminal operations in Palestine with impunity."[20]{endquote}
That is a reality that has been repeated many times in many forms by ex-members of Congress, usually speaking off the record. It is the reality that Chomsky and the left prefer to ignore. The problem is not so much that Chomsky has been wrong. He has, after all, been right on many other things, particularly in describing the ways in which the media manipulates the public consciousness to serve the interests of the state.[21] However, by explaining US support for Israel simply as a component of those interests, and ignoring the influence of the Israel lobby in determining that component, he appears to have made a major error that has had measurable consequences. By accepting Chomsky's analysis, the Palestinian solidarity movement has failed to take the only political step that might have weakened the hold of Israel on Congress and the American electorate, namely, by challenging the billions of dollars in aid and tax breaks that the US provides Israel on an annual basis.
The questions that beg asking are why his argument has been so eagerly accepted by the movement and why the contrary position put forth by people of considerable stature such as Edward Said, Ed Herman, Uri Avnery and, more recently, Alexander Cockburn, has been ignored. There appear to be several reasons.
The people who make up the movement, Jews and non-Jews alike, have embraced Chomsky's position because it is the message they want to hear; not feeling obligated to "blame the Jews" is reassuring. The fear of either provoking anti-Semitism or being called an anti-Semite (or a self- hating Jew), has become so ingrained into our culture and body politic that no one, including Chomsky or Zunes, is immune. This is reinforced by constant reminders of the Jewish Holocaust that, by no accident, appear in the movies and in major news media on a regular basis. Chomsky, in particular, has been heavily criticized by the Jewish establishment for decades for his criticism of Israeli policies, even to the point of being "excommunicated,"a distinction he shares with the late Hannah Arendt. It may be fair to assume that at some level this history influences Chomsky's analysis. But the problems of the movement go beyond the fear of invoking anti-Semitism, as Chomsky is aware and correctly noted in The Fateful Triangle.:
{quote} [T]he American left and pacificist groups, apart from fringe elements, have quite generally been extremely supportive of Israel (contrary to many baseless allegations), some passionately so, and have turned a blind eye to practices that they would be quick to denounce elsewhere.[22] {endquote}
The issue of US aid to Israel provides a clear example. During the Reagan era, there was a major effort launched by the anti-intervention movement to block a $15 million annual appropriation destined for the Nicaraguan contras. People across the country were urged to call their Congressional representatives and get them to vote against the measure. That effort was not only successful, it forced the administration to engage in what became known as Contragate.
At the time, Israel was receiving the equivalent of that much money on a daily basis, without a whimper from the movement. Now, that amount "officially" is about $10 million a day and yet no major campaign has ever been launched to stem that flow or even call the public's attention to it. When attempts were made they were stymied by the opposition of such key players (at the time) as the American Friends Service Committee, which was anxious, apparently, not to alienate major Jewish contributors. (Recent efforts initiated on the internet to "suspend" military aid - but not economic - until Israel ends the occupation have gone nowhere.)
The slogans that have been advanced by various sectors of the Palestinian solidarity movement, such as "End the Occupation," "End Israeli Apartheid," "Zionism Equals Racism," or "Two States for Two Peoples," while addressing key issues of the conflict, assume a level of awareness on the part of the American people for which no evidence exists. Concern for where their tax dollars are going, particularly at a time of massive cutbacks in social programs, certainly would have greater resonance among voters. Initiating a serious campaign to halt aid, however, would require focusing on the role of Congress and recognition of the power of the Israel lobby.
Chomsky's evaluation of Israel's position in the Middle East admittedly contains elements of truth, but nothing sufficient to explain what former Undersecretary of State George Ball described as America's "passionate attachment" to the Jewish state.[23] However, his attempt to portray the US-Israel relationship as mirroring that of Washington's relations to its client regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, has no basis in reality.
US involvement in Central America was fairly simple. Arms and training were supplied to military dictatorships in order for their armies and their death squads to suppress the desires of their own citizens for land, civil rights and economic justice, all of which would undermine US corporate interests. This was quite transparent. Does Israel fit into that category? Obviously not. Whatever one may say about Israel, its Jewish majority, at least, enjoys democratic rights.
Also, there were no Salvadoran, Nicaraguan or Guatemalan lobbies of any consequence in Washington to lavish millions of dollars wooing or intimidating members of Congress; no one in the House or Senate from any of those client countries with possible dual-loyalties approving multi-billion dollar appropriations on an annual basis; none owning major television networks, radio stations, newspapers or movie studios, and no trade unions or state pension funds investing billions of dollars in their respective economies. The closest thing in the category of national lobbies is that of Miami's Cuban exiles, whose existence and power the left is willing to acknowledge, even though its political clout is miniscule compared to that of Israel's supporters.
What about Chomsky's assertion that Israel is America's cop-on-the-beat in the Middle East? There is, as yet, no record of a single Israeli soldier shedding a drop of blood in behalf of US interests, and there is little likelihood one will be asked to do so in the future. When US presidents have believed that a cop was necessary in the region, US troops were ordered to do the job.
When President Eisenhower believed that US interests were threatened in Lebanon in 1958, he sent in the Marines. In 1991, as mentioned, President Bush not only told Israel to sit on the sidelines, he further angered its military by refusing to allow then Defense Sectretary Dick Cheney to give the Israeli air force the coordinates it demanded in order to take to the air in response to Iraq's Scud attacks. This left the Israeli pilots literally sitting in their planes, waiting for information that never came.[24]
What Chomsky offers as proof of Israel's role as a US gendarme was the warning that Israel gave Syria not to intervene in King Hussein's war on the Palestinian Liberation Organization in Jordan in September 1970.
Clearly this was done primarily to protect Israel's interests. That it also served Washington's agenda was a secondary consideration. For Chomsky, it was "another important service" for the US.[25] What Chomsky may not be aware of is another reason that Syria failed to come to the rescue of the Palestinians at the time:
The commander of the Syrian air force, Hafez Al-Assad, had shown little sympathy with the Palestinian cause and was critical of the friendly relations that the PLO enjoyed with the Syrian government under President Atassi. When King Hussein launched his attack, Assad kept his planes on the ground.
Three months later, he staged a coup and installed himself as president. Among his first acts was the imprisonment of hundreds of Palestinians and their Syrian supporters. He then proceeded to gut the Syrian sponsored militia, Al-Saika, and eliminate the funds that Syria had been sending to Palestinian militia groups. In the ensuing years, Assad allowed groups opposed to Yasser Arafat to maintain offices and a radio station in Damascus, but little else. A year after Israel's invasion of Lebanon, he sponsored a short, but bloody intra-Palestinian civil war in Northern Lebanon. This is history that has fallen through the cracks.
How much the presence of Israel has intimidated its weaker Arab neighbors from endangering US interests is at best a matter of conjecture. Clearly, Israel's presence has been used by these reactionary regimes, most of them US allies, as an excuse for suppressing internal opposition movements. (One might argue that the CIA's involvement in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953, and Abdel Karim Kassem in Iraq in 1963, had more of an impact on crushing progressive movement in the region.)
What Israel has provided for the US to their mutual benefit have been a number of joint weapons programs, largely financed by US taxpayers and the use by the US of military equipment developed by Israeli technicians - not the least of which were the "plows"that were used to bury alive fleeing Iraqi soldiers in the first Gulf War. Since high levels of US aid preceded these weapons programs, it is hard to argue that they form the basis of US support.
Another argument advanced by Chomsky has been Israel's willingness to serve the US by taking on tasks which past US administrations were unable or unwilling to undertake due to specific US laws or public opinion, such as selling arms to unsavory regimes or training death squads.
That Israel did this at the request of the US is an open question. A comment by Israeli minister Yakov Meridor's comment in Ha'aretz, at the time, makes it unlikely:
{quote} We shall say to the Americans: Don't compete with us in Taiwan, don't compete with us in South Africa, don't compete with us in the Caribbean area, or in other areas in which we can sell weapons directly and where you can't operate in the open. Give us the opportunity to do this and trust us with the sales of ammunition and hardware. [26] {endquote}
In fact, there was no time that the US stopped training death squads in Latin America, or providing arms, with the exception of Guatemala, where Carter halted US assistance because of its massive human rights violations, something that presented no problem for an Israeli military already steeped in such violations. In one situation we saw the reverse situation. Israel provided more than 80% of El Salvador's weapons before the US moved in.
As for Israel's trade and joint arms projects, including the development of nuclear weaponry, with South Africa, that was a natural alliance: two societies that had usurped someone else's land and saw themselves in the same position, "a civilized people surrounded by threatening savages." The relationship became so close that South Africa's Sun City became the resort of choice for vacationing Israelis.
The reason that Israeli officials gave for selling these weapons, when questioned, was that it was the only way that Israel could keep its own arms industry functioning. Israel's sales of sophisticated weaponry to China has drawn criticism from several administrations, but this has been tempered by Congressional pressure.
What Israel did benefit from was a blanket of silence from the US anti-intervention movement and anti-apartheid movements, whose leadership was more comfortable criticizing US policies than those of Israel's. Whether their behavior was due to their willingness to put Israel's interests first, or whether they were concerned about provoking anti-Semitism, the result was the same.
A protest that I organized in 1985 against Israel's ties to apartheid South Africa, and its role as a US surrogate in Central America, provides a clear example of the problem. When I approached board members of the Nicaraguan Information Center (NIC) in San Francisco and asked for the group's endorsement of the protest,
I received no support. NIC was the main group in solidarity with the Sandinistas and, despite Israel's long and ugly history, first in aiding Somoza and, at the time of the protest, the contras, the board votedS well, they couldn't vote not to endorse, so they voted to make "no more endorsements,"a position they reversed soon after our rally. NIC's board was almost entirely Jewish.
I fared better with GNIB, the Guatemalan News and Information Bureau, but only after a considerable struggle. At the time, Israel was supplying 98% of the weaponry and all of the training to one of the most murderous regimes in modern times. One would think that an organization that claimed to be working in solidarity with the people of Guatemala would not only endorse the rally but be eager to participate.
Apparently, the GNIB board was deeply divided on the issue. Unwilling to accept another refusal, I harassed the board with phone calls until it voted to endorse. Oakland CISPES (Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador) endorsed. The San Francisco chapter declined. (A year earlier, when I had been quoted in the San Francisco Weekly criticizing the influence of the Israel lobby on the Democratic Party, officials from the chapter wrote a letter to the editor claiming that I was provoking "anti-Semitism.") The leading anti-apartheid organizations endorsed the protest but, again, after lengthy internal debate.
The protest had been organized in response to the refusal of the San Francisco-based Mobilization for Peace, Jobs and Justice, (Mobe), a coalition of movement organizations, to include any mention of the Middle East among the demands that it was issuing for a march opposing South African apartheid and US intervention in Central America.
At an organizing meeting for the event, a handful of us asked that a plank calling for "No US Intervention in the Middle East" be added to the demands that had previously been decided. The vote was overwhelmingly against it. A Jewish trade unionist told us that "we could do more for the Palestinians by not mentioning them, than by mentioning them," a strange response which mirrored what President Reagan was then saying about ending apartheid in South Africa. I was privately told later that if the Middle East was mentioned, "the unions would walk," recognition of the strong support for Israel that exists among the labor bureaucracy, as well as the willingness of the movement to defer to it.
The timing of the Mobe's refusal was significant. Two and a half years earlier, Israel had invaded Lebanon and its troops still remained there as we met that evening. And yet, the leaders of the Mobe would not let Tina Naccache, a programmer for Berkeley's KPFA, the only Lebanese in the large union hall, speak in behalf of the demand.
Three years later, the Mobe scheduled another mass march. The Palestinians were in the first full year of their intifada, and it seemed appropriate that a statement calling for an end to Israeli occupation be added to the demands. The organizers, the same ones from 1985, had already decided on what they would be behind closed doors: "No US Intervention in Central America or the Caribbean; End US Support for South African Apartheid; Freeze and Reverse the Nuclear Arms Race; Jobs and Justice, Not War."
This time the Mobe took no chances and canceled a public meeting where our demand could be debated and voted on. An Emergency Coalition for Palestinian Rights was formed in response. A petition was drawn up and circulated supporting the demand. Close to 3,000 people signed it, including hundreds from the Palestinian community. The Mobe leadership finally agreed to one concession. On the back of its official flyer, where it would be invisible when posted on a wall or tree, was the following sentence:
{quote} Give peace a chance everywhere: The plight of the Palestinian people, as shown by the recent events in the West Bank and Gaza, remind us that we must support human rights everywhere. Let the nations of our world turn from building armies and death machines to spending their energy and resources on improving the quality of life - Peace, Jobs and Justice.{endquote}
There was no mention of Israel or the atrocities its soldiers were committing. The flyer, put out by the unions ignored the subject completely.
Fast forward to February, 2002, when a new and smaller version of the Mobe met to plan a march and rally to oppose the US war on Afghanistan. There was a different cast of characters but they produced the same result. The argument was that what was needed was a "broad" coalition and raising the issue of Palestine would prevent that from happening.
The national movement to oppose the extension of the Iraq war has been no different. As in 1991, at the time of the Gulf War, there were competing large marches, separately organized but with overlapping participants. Despite their other political differences, what the organizers of both marches agreed on was that there would be no mention of the Israel-Palestine conflict in any of the protest literature, even though its connections to the situation in Iraq were being made at virtually every other demonstration taking place throughout the world. The movement's fear of alienating American Jews still takes precedence over defending the rights of Palestinians.
Last September, the slogan of "No War on Iraq - Justice for Palestine!"drew close to a half-million protesters to Trafalgar Square. The difference had been presciently expressed by a Native American leader during the first Intifada. "The problem with the movement," he told me, "is that there are too many liberal Zionists."
If there is one event that exposed their influence over of the movement, it is what occurred in the streets of New York on June 12, 1982, when 800,000 people gathered in front of the United Nations to call for a ban on nuclear weapons. Six days earlier, on June 6th, Israel had launched a devastating invasion of Lebanon. Its goal was to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organization, then based in that country. Eighty thousand soldiers, backed by massive bombing from the air and from the sea were creating a level of death and destruction that dwarfed what Iraq would later do in Kuwait. Within a year there would be 20,000 Palestinians and Lebanese dead and tens of thousands more wounded.
And what was the response that day in New York? In recognition of the suffering then taking place in his homeland, a Lebanese man was allowed to sit on the stage, but he would not be introduced; not allowed to say a word. Nor was the subject mentioned by any of the speakers. Israel and its lobby couldn't have asked for anything more.
Twenty-one years later, Ariel Sharon, the architect of that invasion, is Israel's Prime Minister, having been elected for the second time. As I write these lines, pro-Israel zealots within the Bush administration are about to savor their greatest triumph. After all, they have been the driving force for a war which they envision as the first stage in "redrawing the map of the Middle East," with the US-Israel alliance at its fore. [27]
And the Left? Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a long-time activist with impeccable credentials, assured the Jewish weekly, Forward, that United for Peace and Justice, organizers of the February 15th anti-war rally in New York, "has done a great deal to make clear it is not involved in anti-Israel rhetoric. From the beginning there was nothing in United for Peace's statements that dealt at all with the Israel-Palestine issue."[28]
Notes
1. Noam Chomsky, The Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, South End Press, 1983, p. 13.
2. Roane Carey, Ed., The New Intifada, Verso, 2001, p. 6.
3. Stephen Zunes, Tinderbox, Common Courage Press, 2003, p. 163.
4. J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power, Addison-Wesley, 1996.
5. Bill and Kathy Christison, "Too Many Smoking Guns to Ignore: Israel, American Jews, and the War on Iraq," Counterpunch (online). http://www.counterpunch.org/christison01252003.html
6. J. J. Goldberg, ibid., p. 158.
7. ibid., p. 159.
8. University of Chicago, 1993, p. 1.
9. Footnote, The Nation, Feb. 10, 2003, p.13.
10. The Rogers Plan, introduced by Nixon's Secretary of State William Rogers was accepted by Egyptian President Gamal Nasser but turned down by Israel and the PLO, since at the time the Palestinians had dreams of returning to the entirety of what had been Palestine. Under the plan, the West Bank would have been returned to Jordan and Gaza to Egypt.
11. Ha'aretz, March 6, 1981.
12. Edward Tivnan, The Lobby, Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy, Simon & Schuster, 1988.
13. Z Magzine, December 1991.
14. Goldberg, op. cit.
15. Washington Jewish Week, March 22, 1990.
16. Washington Post, April 11, 2002.
17. New York Times, April 12, 2002.
18. International Herald Tribune, April 19, 2002.
19. Stephen Green, Taking Sides, America's Secret Relations with Militant Israel, William Morrow, 1984. 20. Al-Ahram, June 20-27, 2002.
21. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, Pantheon Books, 1988.
22. Chomsky, op. cit., p. 14.
23. George W. Ball and Douglas B. Ball, The Passionate Attachment, America's Involvement with Israel, 1947 to the Present, Norton, 1992.
24. Moshe Arens, Broken Covenant, Simon and Shuster, 1995, p. 162-175.
25. The New Intifada, p. 9.
26. Los Angeles Times and Financial Times, August 18, 1981.
27. Bill and Kathy Christison, op. cit.; Robert G. Kaiser, "Bush and Sharon Nearly Identical On Mideast Policy," Washington Post, Feb. 9, 2003; p. A01
28. Forward, February 14, 2003
{end}
(15) William Pfaff: The philosophers of chaos reap a whirlwind
IHT Saturday, August 23, 2003
Washington's utopians http://iht.com/cgi-bin/generic.cgi?template=articleprint.tmplh&ArticleId=107 407
PARIS The intensification of violence in Iraq is the logical outcome of the Bush administration's choice in 2001 to treat terrorism as a military problem with a military solution - a catastrophic oversimplification.
Choosing to invade two Islamic states, Afghanistan and Iraq, neither of which was responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, inflated the crisis, in the eyes of millions of Muslims, into a clash between the United States and Islamic society.
The two wars did not destroy Al Qaeda. They won it new supporters. The United States is no more secure than it was before.
The wars opened killing fields in two countries that no one knows how to shut down, with American forces themselves increasingly the victims. This was not supposed to happen. ...
The neoconservatives believe that destruction produces creation. They believe that to smash and conquer is to be victorious. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Israel is an influence, although one would think they might have seen that a policy of "smash and conquer" has given him no victories in Lebanon or the Palestinian territories.
They believe that the United States has a real mission, to destroy the forces of unrighteousness. They also believe - and this is their great illusion - that such destruction will free the natural forces of freedom and democracy.
In this, they are influenced by the Trotskyist version of Marxist millenarianism that was the intellectual seedbed of the neoconservative movement. But their idea is also very American, as they are credulous followers of Woodrow Wilson, a sentimental utopian who really believed that he had been sent by God to lead mankind to a better world.
They resemble Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, who in 1997 expressed astonishment at the gangster capitalism that had emerged in the former Soviet Union, and which still exists. He said he had assumed that dismantling communism would "automatically establish a free-market entrepreneurial system." ...
(16) Neocons - meet the 'Marxist Right', by Justin Raimondo
THE WAR PARTY UNMASKED
They're red on the inside, red-white-and-blue on the outside ? meet the 'Marxist Right' by Justin Raimondo August 25, 2003
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/justincol.html
The case of Christopher Hitchens is emblematic of so many things: how success can ruin a writer, how far an aristocratic British accent can get you on the American scene, how Trotskyism can morph into Rumsfeld-ism without any visible exertion. The former features editor of the Socialist Worker newspaper is today the Court Polemicist of the War Party, whose jeremiads now grace the glossy pages of Vanity Fair magazine. His evolution, more clearly and interestingly than any other figure, maps the progress of a new ideology, a political phenomenon unique to our time, one that is neither "left" nor "right." It is new because what made it possible is the global primacy of American military power, and Hitchens is its most consistent and articulate spokesman.
Up until now, this new ideology has gone under more than a few aliases: neoconservatism, Shachtmanism, the Third Camp, Menshevism, social democracy, New Labour, the New Democrats. But now Hitchens, clever to a fault, has coined a new phrase, one that fits as none of the others ever did.
At the end of his review of Eric Hobsbawm's recent memoir, in Sunday's New York Times, Hitchens discusses the decline of the British far left as the dominant force in the Labour Party. He notes that the supposedly unrepentant admirer of the Soviet Union and longtime Communist Party stalwart looked on this development approvingly. The labor movement, Hobsbawm argued, was a relic, its militancy long since dissipated by the rising standard of living. Hitchens writes:
"This was timed with extraordinary, if accidental, deftness. For many people on the existing left, it raised the curtain, not only on the decline of British Labor but also ? and then much less thinkable ? on the corollary ascendancy of Margaret Thatcher. Hobsbawm, in a whole chapter on this episode, makes it clear that he understood and even welcomed the logic of what he had said: the left had to be defeated, and its illusions dispelled, if progress was to resume."
In a "dialectical" twist that seems almost a caricature of the concept, however, defeat has turned into victory for the British left. Shorn of illusions and radiating certainty, New Labour has achieved a new ideological synthesis that would have warmed the cockles of old Karl's heart. As Hitchens put it:
"After a long and arduous shakeout, this has culminated in the near obliteration of the Tory Party and the rise to power of Tony Blair, at once the most radical and the most conservative of politicians. Very many of Blair's tough young acolytes received their political baptism in what I try to call the Marxist Right, the doctrines of which might be termed Hobsbawmian. Thus a long life devoted to the idea that history was inexorable has, as its summary achievement, the grand recognition that irony outlasts the dialectic."
If Hitchens has been "trying" to call it "the "Marxist Right," then certainly libertarians and paleoconservatives ought to help him out. He has coined a very useful and deadly accurate phrase, one that should be immediately expropriated and spread far and wide. It precisely describes the up-until-now nameless creed that glories in the power and majesty of a rising Anglo-American imperium, and is being marketed in both "left" and "right" editions.
The "Marxist Right" may be oxymoronic, but then that would make perfect sense in our post-9/11 Bizarro world, where up is down, left is right, and the ghost of Leon Trotsky roams the halls of the White House.
In fighting a war, and more to come, to force the Middle East to undergo a "transformation," the U.S., under an ostensibly conservative chief executive, is undertaking a social engineering project beyond the wildest dreams of any Soviet commissar. Even the rhetoric of the War Party has acquired a Soviet lilt, complete with routine references to the "liberation" of Iraq and clumsy propaganda campaigns like the saga of Jessica Lynch.
The "Marxist Right" ? that is what the movement ? or, I should say, persuasion ? of the neoconservatives is all about, not only intellectually, but also stylistically and in its methods of operation. It is a movement whose commissars are ruthless in purging all dissidents, where unconditional support of a foreign power is a fundamental canon, and where power-worship is the secular religion of the intellectuals.
Hitchens' brilliant formulation recalls the historical analogy made by Walter Russell Mead, in Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World: differentiating the Wilsonian and Jeffersonian schools of American foreign policy, he wrote that, while "the highest aim of Jeffersonian statecraft" centered around defending and preserving the libertarian legacy of the American Revolution,
"This defensive spirit is very far from the international revolutionary fervor of the Wilsonian current in American life. Wilsonians could be called the Trotskyites of the American Revolution; they believe that the security and success of the Revolution at home demands its universal extension though the world. Jeffersonians take the Stalinist point of view: Building democracy in one country is enough challenge for them, and they are both skeptical about the prospects for revolutionary victories abroad and concerned about the dangers to the domestic Revolution that might result from excessive entanglements in foreign quarrels. Wilsonians are reasonably confident that the Revolutionary legacy in the United States is secure from internal dangers. They also believe that the United States, without too much blood or gold, can spread democracy around the world."
So that's why all these former fans of the founder of the Red Army are now hailing the "liberating" power of American military might! I knew there had to be a reason.
The Marxist Right echoes its leftist antecedents in its sense of historical inevitability. As Mead puts it, the Wilsonians believe
"The tide of history is running with American democracy. The American revolution is sweeping the world."
The neoconservatives, having once convinced themselves that the End of Ideology was upon us, came up with a new one in the 1990s: the End of History. The philosophy of Alexander Kojeve, who pronounced the United States as the embodiment and instrument of the Marxist vision of a "world homogenous state," was revived. The fall of the Kremlin, and the final victory of liberal democracy, or social democratic capitalism, meant that the battle was over: now it was just a matter of ironing out the details and defeating the last remnants of premodernity. History, it seems, is on the side of the neocons. This is what Irving Kristol, in his recent reaffirmation of the neoconservative faith, meant when he wrote:
"Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the 'American grain.' It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic."
While Americans have been optimistic about themselves and their abilities, this does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that others have the same capacity or desire. Nor does optimism about the ability of individuals to transform the world translate easily into the belief that governments can have the same effect. It will take a triumph of "dialectical" thinking for the Marxist Right to explain how the deep conservative suspicion of government power at home becomes a naïve embrace of state-sponsored utopianism abroad.
Hitchens, with characteristic perceptiveness, has homed in on a development both exciting and horrific. The Marxist Right is on the march. Trotsky-cons and Straussians, Israel Firsters and careerists on the make, the ranks of this new movement are varied ? and at times bizarre ? but they serve an essential function in the social economy of Empire. They are the Court Intellectuals, and every Imperial Court needs them: their job is to rationalize the Empire, to make sure it has support not only among the influentials, the cultural leaders and social and academic elites who dominate the national discourse, but also that this sense of fealty trickles down to the great unwashed masses.
As an ideological current, the Marxist Right synthesizes the worst aspects of both sides of the political spectrum ? the militant utopianism of the left and the militaristic elitism of the right. It is the marriage of Socialism ? or Social Democracy, at any rate ? and Empire. A more compatible couple could not be imagined: this is a marriage made in Heaven, and Hitchens is their not-so-angelic offspring.
The rise of the Marxist Right has to mean, therefore, the divorce of the neocons from their former allies, the traditional conservatives. That the two are parting ways at the crossroads of Empire is increasingly understood by both parties. Certainly it was understood by the late Murray N. Rothbard, the founder of the modern libertarian movement, in his 1992 speech to the John Randolph Club:
"Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectable political spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the left over to neoconservatism on the right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever."
NOTES IN THE MARGIN
Put Cato Institute President Ed Crane's online interview with readers of the Washington Post in the category of Not to Be Missed. Long-time Crane-watchers such as myself were fascinated to see Ed rationalize waffling on free trade and foreign policy issues by some of his Cato associates on the grounds that we have to believe in "humility," like F. A. Hayek supposedly did. I'm glad to see Crane come out in favor of humility: now if only he could bring himself to experience it.
Another question touched on the neocons, and the conservative intramural debate, and I cheered as Crane came out guns blazing:
"Neoconservatives, in my view, are a pernicious force with dismaying influence in the Bush administration. On domestic policy they support big government across the board. They were the ones who created the "faith-based initiative" and talked Bush into supporting the greatest federal intrusion in education in American history. They support a massive welfare state. In foreign affairs they are reckless interventionists. The fiasco in Iraq can be laid at their feet. What we need is an alliance of libertarians, traditional limited government conservatives and those few liberals who still support true civil liberties."
No humility there, and a good thing too!
But the best part of the interview was the following exchange:
New York, N.Y.: "You should be ashamed of yourselves. Cato is a big-business sponsored anarchists' club. You advocate denying access to courts, the elimination of all safety and health regulation, and the complete return of society to the dark ages. You are personally and professionally a villain, and the enemy of all civilized people."
Edward H. Crane: "Dear Sir: You may well be right."
Good old Ed. My hat's off to you ...
? Justin Raimondo
{end}
(17) Richard Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing
Despite my interest in Religion and Spirituality, I have not been able to discuss these topics with my children. There seems to be a lack of common language with which to do so. Is it because Hollywood has put other thoughts in their minds? Is it because we don't make young people study history?
Richard Kostelanetz gives the answer:
Richard Kostelanetz, The End of Intelligent Writing: Literary Politics in America (Sheed & Ward, NY 1974).
[p. x] ... Knowledge that is not communicated has a way of turning the mind sour, of being obscured, and finally of being forgotten. C Wright Mills, "The Social Role of the Intellectual" (1944). ...
[p. xi] Preface
The title of this book announces its argument, which holds that a panoply of growing forces and festering symptoms forecast the likely end of "intelligent writing" or "literature" as we have known those traditions. The reason for this crisis is not that such writing is no longer produced - quite the contrary is true - or that it is not read - also untrue - but that the channels of communication between intelligent writer and intelligent reader have become clogged and corrupted.
[p. 12] ... Only an ingenue, however, could still think that the ascendancy of the Southern literati was purely serendipitous.
... The same pattern of insurgence was duplicated a decade and a half later by another well-organized literary minority, the Jewish-American writers. Here again was a core of critics and propagandists; a common commitment to Marxian-Freudianism which politically branched into the two streams of democratic socialism and neo-liberalism ...
{p. 13} What seemed at first surprising was how strongly this group disclaimed any allegiance to religious Judaism or even any interest in Jewish theology.
[p. 14] ... none was Sephardic in background. ...
The Jewish-American writers also sought to reroute the Western intellectual tradition, generally favoring continental (and often Jewish) precedents over Anglo-American. Leslie A. Fiedler describes this attempted shift as fully realized:
Through their Jewish writers, Americans, after the Second World War, were able to establish a new kind of link with Europe in place of the old pale-face connection - a link not with the Europe of decaying castles and the Archbishop of Canterbury, nor with that of the French symbolistes and the deadly polite Action Francaise - for these are all Christian Europes; but with the post-Christian Europes of Marx and Freud, which is to say, of secularized Judaism, as well as the Europe of surrealism and existentialism, Kafka, neo-Chassidism. . .
[p. 22] Both Jews and Southerners tended to favor, as noted before, certain political views ... and just as the Agrarians frequently refought the Civil War and Reconstruction, so did literary Jews persistently redo the Russian Revolution and the subsequent history of Marxian Socialism. ...
[p. 43] Mostly Trotskyist in their sympathies, they had such a decided bias against Stalinism that they also opposed, as "fellow travellers", those intellectuals who were judged to be insufficiently anti-Communist. Through Partisan Review, to quote Fiedler again, "was born of such a marriage of Greenwich Village and [anti-Communist] Marxism" ... By the middle forties, Partisan would garner contributions from such European ex- or anti-Communists as Arthur Koestler {see koestler.html}, Andre Gide, George Orwell, Ignazio Silone (all of whom thus became implicit allies in their strictly parochial literary-political battle with the Jewish Communist writers) ...
{end} more at kostel.html.
Christopher Hitchens illustrates the path from Jewish Trotskyist to Neocon.
Christopher Hitchens For War against Iraq: "It is impossible to compromise with the proponents of sacrificial killing of civilians, the disseminators of anti-Semitic filth, the violators of women and the cheerful murderers of children."
Saving Islam from bin Laden, By Christopher Hitchens
The Age, Melbourne, September 5 2002: http://www.theage.com.au/handheld/articles/2002/09/04/1031115884039.htm.
Hitchens has Jewish relatives. Perhaps the connection between Trotskyism and Neo-Cons is that many Trotskyists identified as Jews, and with Zionism.
How Trotskyists led the Australian Labor Party up the Free Trade path: xTrots.html.
The Neocons' trick has been to "converge" their plans with the Anglo-American Empire's, so that Imperial leaders can't tell the difference.
Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations envisages a clash between the Anglo-American Empire, and Islam and China: huntington.html.
Casper Weinberg's book The Next War (co-authored with Peter Schweizer) envisages future wars against
Part One: North Korea & China
Part Two: Iran
Part Three: Mexico
Part Four: Russia
Part Five: Japan.
In each case, he makes the US nearly lose, but win in the end. Of course, two of these wars might be going on at once. Weinberger was Reagan's Defense Secretary. Although Jewish, he tried to stop Israel from developing its own fighter, the Lavi, by appropriating F16 technology.
Note that Iraq does not even appear in Weinberg's candidates for war; the book was published in 1996. But of course, Iraq was on the Neocons' roadmap, and Mossad's.
The early Soviet Union - after Lenin and Trotsky, but before Stalin's ascendancy: soviet-union-early.html.
Making sense of Stalin: stalin.html.
Back to the Zionism/Communism index: zioncom.html.
 
Write to me at contact.html.

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