Sunday 8 June 2008

In League

Reviewing Robert Kagan’s latest effort, Will Hutton writes:

"I have often wondered how Britain's Eurosceptics would be shown to be out-of-date charlatans, but never thought it would fall to an American neocon to show them up for what they are."

“EU Is Neocon Project Shock”. Anybody who didn’t know that anyway should not be employed by The Beano, never mind The Observer.

Still, it’s good to know that Israel would not now get into Kagan’s “League of Democracies”, while America also won’t be eligible in a very short months’ time.

4 comments:

  1. What's a neocon? Can you give a link to a definition you'd recommend?

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  2. It is useless to read nonsense by the likes of Douglas Murray, who doesn't even mention neoconservatism's Trotskyist roots, and who tries to pretend that it has anything to do with either Christianity or Euroscepticism.

    So here goes.

    Neoconservatism is now, or was until very recently, in government in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Israel, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal. It also has a politically substantial presence in France, the Irish Republic and New Zealand, among other places. Its erstwhile Portuguese leader is now President of the European Commission.

    Yet it has no roots whatever in the mainstream political tradition of any country on earth. Even in the United States, its intellectual debts are to Max Shachtman, Leo Strauss and Ayn Rand. Shachtman tried to make Trotskyism Americanist. Meanwhile, Strauss and Rand gave life to Huey Long's prediction that America would one day produce its own Fascism, but would call it anti-Fascism.

    Then add in, first, the sort of Zionism that denies the very existence of the Palestinians as a people. It would annex the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to the State of Israel, along with Lebanon south of the Litani River. And it would clear all non-Jews from Israel thus expanded: they could go to Jordan or to a northern Lebanon annexed to Syria, or they could be put to death.

    Add in, secondly, a stock Irish-American saloon-bar rant against a perceived Anglophile network within the WASP élite. What are David Trimble, Paul Bew and Tim Collins doing, associating with this sort of thing through The Henry Jackson Society?

    Neoconservatism takes this anti-British hysteria even further, demanding the wholesale Americanisation (in the neocons' own terms) of Britain's, Canada's, Australia's and New Zealand's economic, social, cultural and political systems, though without the conferral of American citizenship, and thus without representation in Congress or the Electoral College.

    So much for the Anglosphere, from which America is in any case busily detaching herself by means of the unrestricted immigration supported by the neoconservatives.

    That support is because they rightly recognise that there cannot be a "free" market in goods, services and capital but not in labour (or vice versa), there being nothing less conservative than capitalism.

    But it is also because insistent non-English-speakers are cheap labour for the neocons' financial backers, and provide an electoral base for their standard-bearing dynasty.

    And it is because they actively want to make America as unlike the hated Britain (and by extension Canada, Australia and New Zealand) as possible. Indeed, they want to make Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand into totally dependent carbon copies of this America purged of real or imaginary British influence.

    Their definition of the Anglosphere so as to exclude the West Indies is because they deny the economic, social, cultural and political Christian heritage common to the Anglo-Celtic and the West African slave-descended peoples. That heritage includes not only their common English language (which the neoconservatives' immigration policies are doing so much to displace in the United States), but also their common blood ties. And those ties are not only in the Americas, but also here in these islands, and thus also in later settler societies.

    By excluding the West African slave-descended and the Christian dimensions abroad (in American terms), the neoconservatives very deliberately exclude both the West African slave-descended and the Christian dimensions at home (in those terms), and thus also in their narrowly defined Anglosphere as remade in the image of their own racist, anti-Christian remaking of the United States.

    Not that the neoconservatives have no interest in the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean, with which so many British Citizens have such close connections.

    It is possible in principle for any of the Commonwealth Realms to retain or abolish the monarchy regardless of the decision of any other of them. But it is very difficult to see how any of those in the Caribbean could do so in practice if the forcible Americanisation of Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand had included (as, of course, it would have to) the abolition of the monarchy in all four of those countries.

    Thus will the Commonwealth Realms and British Overseas Territories of the Caribbean be made ripe for invasion and colonisation, along with the two republics (Guyana, and Trinidad and Tobago) to which they are so intimately related. Something very similar will happen in the Pacific.

    It is striking how many neoconservatives are self-hating Canadian subjects of the Crown and products of the Keynes-Beveridge settlement: David Frum, Mark Steyn, Conrad Black, Barbara Amiel, and so on.

    Not that Canada is the only, or even the worst, case of the closely related rise of hostility to that settlement, hostility to the Crown, and support for American neoconservative foreign policy.

    Add in, thirdly, the influence of neo-orthodoxy, a mid-twentieth century movement to salvage the traditional vocabulary of Protestant theology even while surrendering to every liberal, secularising assault.

    As among Lutherans and Calvinists on the Continent, and as in the Anglican, Scottish Presbyterian and historic Nonconformist bodies in Britain, so also in the related "mainline" churches in the United States, neo-orthodoxy successfully sold itself as a vindication of popular orthodoxy.

    But it is actually ruinous of such faith, as is evident from, among much else, "mainline" churchgoers’ support for neoconservatives.

    And add in, fourthly, one of the two de facto schismatic Americanist bodies within the Catholic Church.

    For American Catholics now divide almost entirely between those who agree with the Pope about sex but not about economics, and those who agree with him about economics but not about sex. The latter are termed "liberals" and excoriated by the former, termed "conservatives".

    But, in fact, they are equally far removed from the Church’s position, which includes a huge amount of almost unutterably important work on how all these things are connected.

    The "liberals" just happen to fail to give the Papacy any credit when they are heavily dependent on its work. By contrast, the "conservatives" lionised the old Pope, lionise the new one, and simply ignore the vast amount of Papal Teaching with which they happen to disagree.

    Thus, the "conservatives" are able to present themselves as more loyal to Rome than are the "liberals". In reality, both bodies believe at some level that the American Church is autonomous, and both behave exactly as if such were the case.

    Those who follow the "conservative" schism are key figures in neoconservatism. They attached themselves to the radical-revisionist misappropriation of the name of Vatican II. This brought them into the same counter-cultural circles out of which neoconservatism was to emerge.

    It should be noted that one of the most powerful neoconservatives grew up as an ultraconservative Lutheran, became a liberal Lutheran pastor, and converted to Catholicism only when he became a neoconservative!

    But do not add in Evangelical Protestantism, to which neoconservatism relates much as Irish Republicanism relates to Catholicism. In principle, they have nothing to do with each other beyond being mutually antagonistic. The upper echelons of each hold the views and persons of the other in horrified contempt.

    Yet large numbers of devout Catholics have been cajoled or deceived into supporting Irish Republicanism despite its Jacobin and Marxist roots and character. And large numbers of Evangelical Protestants have been cajoled or deceived into supporting neoconservatism despite its Trotskyism, its Straussianism, its Randianism, its Zionism (serious Evangelical scholars are not "Christian Zionists"), its hatred of WASPs and Ulster Scots, its neo-orthodoxy, its Americanist pseudo-Catholicism, and its roots in the counter-culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

    Such is the ideology of those who have sold themselves as the defenders of Western civilisation while actively seeking to destroy all memory of that civilisation's roots in the Biblical-Classical synthesis that is Christianity.

    They have sold themselves as the West's guardians against "militant Islam" (the only kind that there can ever be, as they pointedly refuse to admit). Yet theirs was active support for that cause in 1980s Afghanistan and in 1990s Yugoslavia (against Europe's real age-old bulwark against Islam) and in Kosovo (likewise). It remains so in Kosovo, in Chechnya, in Saudi Arabia and in Pakistan, among other places.

    That cause has been done no end of good by the removal of one of the Arab world's two principal bulwarks against it, in Iraq. And now the neoconservatives are planning to remove the other such bulwark, in Syria.

    All this while actively encouraging, through the unlimited immigration without which their capitalist system cannot function, the Islamisation of the West. This whole is with a view to their re-establishment for themselves of the privileged dhimmitude that existed in Moorish Spain.

    And they have sold themselves as the champions of English-speaking unity while seeking to purge America of what they see as British influence, before seeking to remake the Anglosphere (defined in racist terms) in the image of America thus purged.

    In so doing, they have sought to destroy the English-speaking world’s single most unifying institution. But, of course, that institution, at the head of or otherwise constitutionally related to nearly forty states and territories, is one of the world's two principal institutional expressions of Christianity.

    The other such expression was once its great antagonist, but that is a small and all-but-forgotten matter now, and in any case the neoconservatives have done at least as much to subvert that, too.

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  3. But in that very long-winded passage you don't actually say what neoconservatism is.

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  4. It is the Marxism of those who have merely changed the ending so that the bourgeoisie wins.

    They have retained intact their Marxist dialectical materialism.

    They have retained intact their Leninist vanguard elitism, “democratic centralism”, and use of religious and other interests as “Useful Idiots”.

    They have retained intact their Trotskyist entryism and belief in the permanent revolution.

    And yet hey have also retained intact their Stalinist belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class must be created in a superstate in order to be exported throughout the world, including by force of arms, while vanguard elites everywhere owe their patriotic allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own respective countries.

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