Neoconservatism

Neocons, Ukraine, Russia, and the Western Struggle for Global Hegemony

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Part of this was originally posted in 2014 but remains relevant, with some updates/elaborations, as noted. 

Philip Giraldi has a nice column on the continuing power of the neocons, particularly in the Ukraine situation (“Diplomacy is a Four-Letter Word“).

The vitriol unloaded on Russia since the rise of Vladimir Putin and most recently to ridicule almost every aspect of the Olympic Games is astonishing. …

The sustained pressure on the Ukraine over the past several months has likewise been remarkable and, under other circumstances, it would all be difficult to explain but for the fact that it and Russia are essentially two halves of one policy that is being orchestrated by the same group of neoconservatives, some of whom have now, fortuitously enough, attached themselves to the party in power in the White House, which is the Democrats. It was easy enough to do as many neocons are basically liberal Democrats if one excludes their aggressive foreign policy views.

Right. The neocons are too often associated only with the Republicans, but historically the neocons have had a strong position in the Democratic Party and have pulled the Republicans to the left on vital issues such as immigration. Indeed, a very important strand came out of the far left Trotskyist followers of Max Shachtman, a Jewish labor leader who, by the time of his death, had made major inroads in the Democratic Party and whose legacy is still with us today.

The Trotskyist movement had a Jewish milieu as Shachtman attracted young Jewish disciples—the familiar rabbi/disciple model of Jewish intellectual movements. … He became the quintessential rabbinical guru—the leader of a close, psychologically intense group. …

By the late 1950s he moved into the mainstream of U.S. social democracy” with a strategy of pushing big business and white Southerners out of the Democratic Party (the converse of Nixon’s “Southern strategy” for the Republican Party). In the 1960s “he suggested more openly than ever before that U.S. power could be used to promote democracy in the third world”—a view that aligns him with later neoconservatives.  …

In 1972, shortly before his death, Shachtman, “as an open anti-communist and supporter of both the Vietnam War and Zionism,” backed Senator Henry Jackson in the Democratic presidential primary. Jackson was a strong supporter of Israel (see below), and by this time support for Israel had “become a litmus test for Shachtmanites.” (see “Neoconservatism as a Jewish Movement,” p. 17).  Read more

Neocons flock to Biden: It’s All About Jewish Values

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Probably the least surprising news you will hear in this election season, from Philip Weiss, “Neoconservatives are flocking to Biden (and let’s forget about the Iran deal.”

Neoconservatives are flocking to the Biden campaign. The DC braintrust that believes in using US military power to aid Israel in the Middle East has jumped parties before– to Clinton in ’92, and back to Bush in 2000– and now they’re hopping aisles to support Biden, with Bill Kristol leading the way.

Last night on an official Biden campaign webinar led by “Jewish Americans for Biden”, and moderated by Ann Lewis of Democratic Majority for Israel, two prominent neocon Republicans endorsed Biden, primarily because of Trump’s character posing a danger to democracy. But both neocons emphasized that Biden would be more willing to use force in the Middle East and reassured Jewish viewers that Biden will seek to depoliticize Israel support, won’t necessarily return to the Iran deal and will surround himself with advisers who support Israel and believe in American military intervention. …

Eliot Cohen, a Bush aide and academic, echoed the fear that Israel is being politicized. “A lot of Jews made a big mistake by taking something I was in favor of, moving the embassy to Jerusalem and obsessing about that,” he said. But there was huge political risk in that: if the United States is internally divided, at war with itself, and “Israel has become a partisan issue, which it should never ever be…. That’s not in Israel’s longterm security interest.”

Biden will reverse that trend by appointing strong supporters of Israel, Cohen said.

“Joe Biden has a long record as a friend of Israel. I think we’re both quite familiar with the kinds of people who will go into a Biden administration and I think we feel very comfortable that they will have a deep and abiding concern for Israel which is not going to go away.”

Edelman also said that Trump has created many “dangers” in the region by not being aggressive:

“By withdrawing or threatening to withdraw US forces, by repeatedly not replying or dealing with Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf or against Saudi oil infrastructure, he’s created a sort of vacuum that is being filled in Libya by Russia and by Turkey…”

Biden will work with allies and be ready to use U.S. military in the region– or as Edelman said, “to play.”

“The region is a mess,” Edelman said. “And yet the president continually says he wants the U.S. to withdraw from the region. The reality is that the withdrawal of US power form the region has helped create this morass of threats.”

He cited three war zones in which the U.S. or proxies’ bombing is essential to U.S. security, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

In Syria, “The Trump administration pulled out and said, we don’t want to play here,” Edelman said.

“Other forces are going to fill the vacuum created by the absence of US leadership and they won’t be benign forces,” Edelman said. Iran, Russia, or Turkey will come in and create a “vortex of instability that can potentially come back to haunt us” — with terrorist attacks or the disruption of energy markets.

Cohen and Edelman opposed Obama’s Iran deal, and both predicted that Biden will be hawkish on Iran.

In other words, Trump has failed the Israel Lobby because he has tried to pull our US forces from the Middle East and, although he has laid down sanctions against Iran, he has not gone to war. Of course, these are the people who promoted the ongoing disaster of the Iraq war. They are probably right that Russia and Turkey would benefit from US pulling out completely (Libya??), but where are legitimate US interests in all this? Trump ran on ending Middle East wars and getting out of the region–the original reason the neocons jumped ship (in addition to fears of a nascent Orange Hitler). Despite being president he has been unable to do so. He has been strongly opposed by the foreign policy establishment and the Pentagon — a testament to the extent to which the US security establishment is Israel-occupied territory.

Lurking in the background of the attitudes of Cohen and Edelman is the idea that Biden would tame the forces on the left that have been so critical of Israel in recent years. With Biden they get it all: Strongly pro-Israel even to the point of initiating a war with Iran, taming the anti-Israel voices on the left (Kamala Harris with her Jewish husband s not among them), and perhaps a Senate led by Israel operative Chuck Schumer. Meanwhile the Republican Party would default to the Chamber of Commerce and the remaining neocons, and the hope of a nationally competitive GOP, much less a truly populist GOP, would die. Bill Kristol loves the prospect of a long-term Democrat domination.

And of course, all of these bellicose proposals are cloaked in a veneer of “Jewish values” — not so ironic if one assumes, as is certainly the case, that promoting war for specifically Jewish interests is indeed a Jewish value.

Cohen … spoke about Jewish values. He and his family belong to an orthodox synagogue and have raised four children with a religious education. “I’ve tried to live my life by Jewish values. One thing that’s very important for Jewish Republicans. Obviously the issue of Israel is important, it’s the only Jewish state, it’s important to look after it and for it to thrive, but what is our approach to politics?” Jews don’t believe that you Render unto God the things that are God and render unto Caesar the thing that are Caesar’s and therefore not take issue with a politician’s character “so long as they do what we want them to do.” He said, “That’s not the Jewish way.” In the Book of Samuel, the king engages “in despicable behavior,” and the prophet storms into his bedroom. “We believe that character matters.” And this election is about character.

Okay, Trump is not a saint. But given that Biden is up to his eyeballs in scandal doesn’t bother Cohen at all — despite overwhelming documentation. So we are not supposed to care that the Biden family raked in millions by using Biden’s influence to alter US foreign policy or that China could easily blackmail him into doing their bidding on trade and military issues. So in the end, it’s really about what Cohen, Edelman, Kristol, et al. think is good for Israel (Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot jumped the GOP ship even before Trump was elected). Again, count me unsurprised.

And of course, the other thing is that neocons have always been on the left within the Republican Party. One might say they have attempted to not only make Israel a bi-partisan issue (their first priority) but also promoting the liberal/left social agenda, such as replacement-level non-White immigration, as a bipartisan issue — both values strongly promoted by the mainstream Jewish community. They jumped ship mainly because Trump was promising to undo the liberal/left social agenda as well as disengage from foreign wars and US occupation of the Middle East. During the 2016 campaign, some of the strongest denunciations of Trump came from neocons (“Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump: Neocon Angst about a Fascist America”).

If you haven’t seen it, Carlson’s interview with Bobulinski is damning, and the documents he refers to have been thoroughly authenticated.

 

On Neocons and Neurotics: Yaron Brook and the Folly of Preemption

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Yaron Brook

Though America is undoubtedly more politically polarized than ever, the view that the War in Iraq was a fiasco is something that almost everyone outside of think tanks or the military industrial complex can agree on. For those familiar with the works of paleocons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried, the idea that the war was a gross waste of American lives and treasure is a recurring theme. That many neocons remain unrepentant (and unaccountable) is not surprising. What may perhaps surprise the reader is that there are some intellectuals who believe the problem with our intervention is that we didn’t go far enough.

Yaron Brook is an Israeli-American who writes for The Objective Standard, a kind of Randian objectivist/rational egoist outlet that makes Bill Kristol’s The Weekly Standard look reasonable. In “‘Just War Theory’ versus American Self-Defense” Brook wastes no time in getting to the heart of the matter when he informs the audience (the piece is adapted from a talk) that in order for the US to win decisively in the Middle East it would have been necessary to “inflict suffering on complicit civilian populations” deliberately.

His models for what should have been done in Iraq include the Allied attacks on Japanese and German cities, which he acknowledges killed “hundreds of thousands.” Brook even approvingly quotes Winston Churchill, who wrote “the severe ruthless bombing of Germany on an ever-increasing scale will not only cripple her war effort…but will create conditions intolerable to the mass of the German population.”

Apparently, the threat of what Brook calls “Islamic Totalitarianism” is to be dealt with in the same way as “the Nazi and Japanese imperialist threats,” which were in no small part resolved by “America’s dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan.” Read more

Alexander Dugin on the Heartland versus the Heartless: The Neocon and Neoliberal Plan for Russia (and America)

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There is a marked difference between freedom and liberty, a distinction which highlights the greatest defect of liberalism (especially as it has come to be understood in postmodern discourse).

“Liberty” implies liberation from something, which marks freedom as a negative category. Because of the connotations of liberty commonly understood in the West before the rise of left-wing concepts like liberation theology (i.e. Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death” speech), the negative functions of liberty aren’t always obvious to people in the Anglosphere, even or perhaps especially those who consider themselves conservative.

The Eurasians don’t struggle with this bind. Alexander Dugin, the Russian political scientist maligned as a fascist in the West, gets to the heart of the matter in his book, Putin vs Putin: Putin viewed from the Right:

Today, in realizing the ‘liberty from’, we understand ever better that this nihilistic agenda is leading us to an abyss.… A declaration of individual freedom in effect means total dependence of the common man on the oligarchy. Individual freedom abolishes all forms of collective identity. One is not allowed to be a supporter of a national state or a religious institution, because this is not politically correct (Dugin 59).

It is not hard to understand why a Russian political scientist is suspicious of liberty as it has been sold by the Atlanticist powers (Western Europe and the U.S.) when too often neoconservative concepts of liberty involve liberating people from their lives, or neoliberal projects result in liberating nations from their resources. This asset-stripping facet of ostensible liberation is also not lost on Dugin: “In a former socialist country, where a capitalist coup was implemented on short notice, state and public property ended up in private hands and social guarantees…were done away with” (Dugin 59-60).

When people are convinced that the responsibilities that bind them to one-another (faith, community, ethnicity) are merely burdens to be shed, when they are sold individualism as a fetishized commodity that atomizes them, they are ripe for plunder and exploitation. Many on the Right cite Saul Alinksy’s Rules for Radicals as a foundational blueprint for how the Left operates (and it is), but no book encapsulates this nihilistic isolation as a desired state of affairs like Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, which holds that “liberals should fight against any ideology or political philosophy (ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Marx and Hegel) that suggests human society should have some common goal, common value, or common meaning” (Dugin 297). Billionaire Jewish business magnate George Soros was so apparently taken with the book, which he considers his “personal bible,” that he saw fit to borrow the title for his grant-making network, the Open Society Foundation. Read more

The Real Obama Legacy, Part 1: Foreign Policy

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obama-foreign-policy

How will Obama be viewed historically? The obvious answer is: in two completely different ways. First, he is now, has been, and will be remembered as one of our greatest, most consequential presidents … by the far left “Mainstream” Media who have uncritically supported him all along. According to a recent CNN broadcast, Obama’s leading accomplishments are “comprehensive healthcare, the rescue of the global economy, the historic deal with Iran to halt that nation’s march towards a nuclear weapon, the global climate change agreements, the appointment of two women to the U.S. Supreme Court, and his moves on social issues such as marriage equality for gay Americans, equal pay legislation, criminal justice reform, and more.”

The second answer is not so generous. We have decided to present our evaluation in a three-part series covering:

  1. Foreign Policy
  2. Economic Legacy
  3. Race Relations

Part 1 focuses on some of the key failures of Obama’s foreign policy that led to the Trump victory in November, principally the passivity of his policy in the Middle East and his championing of the globalist cause of open borders.

Part 1: Foreign Policy

Those who would claim that Obama is one of our greatest presidents are the same folks who have been selling the story that Trump is the new Hitler. Presumably, they believe that in February 2017 Trump will begin rounding up 6 million Muslims and sending them to camps to be executed, much like the US did after Pearl Harbor with Japanese-Americans. What? We did not send 6 million Japanese-Americans to death camps in California? Mea culpa, but it’s hard to keep pace with the revisionist propaganda being taught in our schools and colleges. Read more

James Woolsey: A terrible choice, a grim portent

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From The Irish Savant, originally posted on Friday, 11 November 2016

woolseyIn common with many Trump supporters on the alt-right I’ve long harboured a horrible doubt that – just maybe – he was a huckster using his marketing genius to tap into the zeitgeist, leveraging it to close the ultimate sale. Did he really plan to get on with Russia, de-fund NATO, pull American troops out of the Middle East (i.e. stop fighting wars for Israel) and instead focus attention and resources on domestic issues? If that represented his true beliefs, then he literally could not have made a worse choice for National Security Adviser.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey recognised early in his career the boundless opportunities open to an energetic shabbos goy. Shamelessly throwing in his lot with the Israeli-Jewish power structure, he became rich and powerful despite (or by way of) being mired in corruption and conflict of interest at every stage.

And he repaid his benefactors in full, enthusiastically supporting the slaughter and destruction in Iraq, Libya, Lebanon and Syria. On cue he’s now agitating for war with Iran and for taking a ‘tough stance’ with Russia. He endlessly proclaims Israel to be “America’s greatest friend and ally”. His pandering on occasion has even embarrassed many American Jews, such as when he claimed that spy Jonathan Pollard was in jail only because of his Jewishness.

He’s the Neocon’s Neocon and Trump’s stated position is not compatible with his. Someone will have to concede. I’m not optimistic.

Jewish Fear and Loathing of Donald Trump (5): Would Trump’s Defeat Be Blamed On Jews?

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donaldtrumpataipac

Posted at Vdare.com

See previous articles in this series.

Almost exactly a year ago, VDARE.com Editor Peter Brimelow raised the question of whether America’s Jewish groups would turn on Donald Trump (who after all has Jewish grandchildren and a lifetime of Jewish business associates) with the hysteria they employed against Patrick J. Buchanan. I have been tracking the matter ever since and the answer is now in: yes—clearly triggered by visceral reaction against Trump’s nationalist acceptance speech in Cleveland and outright panic at his subsequent poll lead (July 25-29 according to the Real Clear Politics average). I suspect, however, that we have crossed a watershed and that, regardless of the results of this election, this will not end well for them.

Before the convention, Wall Street Journal Deputy Editorial Page Editor Bret Stephens [Email him] said with astonishing arrogance: “It’s important that Donald Trump and what he represents—this kind of ethnic quote, ‘conservatism,’ or populism be so decisively rebuked that the Republican Party, the Republican voters will forever learn their lesson…” WSJ‘s Bret Stephens: Trump Must Lose So Badly That the GOP Voters ‘Learn Their Lesson’, by Sam Reisman, Mediaite, May 29 2016.

Just on Friday, Paul Krugman [Email him] writing in the New York Times continued the now-widespread theme: any expression of ethnic identity by America’s whites, no matter how implicit, was “bigoted” and “white nationalist”:

Recently Avik Roy, a leading Republican health-policy expert, had the personal and moral courage to admit what liberals (and political scientists) have been saying for years: “In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that top Republicans were or are personally bigoted—but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that they were willing to curry favor with bigots in the service of tax cuts for the rich and financial deregulation. Remember, Mitt Romney eagerly accepted a Trump endorsement in 2012, knowing full well that he was welcoming a racist conspiracy theorist into his camp.

All that has happened this year is a move of those white nationalists from part of the supporting cast to a starring role.

Pieces of Silver, August 12, 2016 (links in original)

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