Political prisoner, activist, journalist, hymn-writer, emerging thinktanker, aspiring novelist, "tribal elder", 2019 parliamentary candidate for North West Durham, Shadow Leader of the Opposition, "Speedboat", "The Cockroach", eagerly awaiting the second (or possibly third) attempt to murder me.
Sunday, 9 September 2007
Beating Fred Thompson
Jim Webb. Has to be. Make Squire Lance his running mate and sweep the board with the real, restored Democratic Party of America’s natural majority: economically “populist” (social democratic in all but name), morally and socially conservative, and implacably hostile to the neoconservative foreign policy agenda, to the neoconservative domestic war against civil liberties, to the neoconservative contrivance and cultivation of a client Hispanic ghetto, to the real neoconservative hostility to Christianity, indeed to every feature of neoconservatism.
Hi David,
ReplyDeleteWhat do you mean by neoconservatism? Do you know a good summary of what neoconservatives believe? I'd be really grateful if you could suggest one.
Thanks,
Ben
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.
ReplyDeleteAnd 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, and indeed the neoconservatives remain Marxist in their dilaectical matertialism; leneinist in their vanguard élitism, their "democratic centralism", and their use of religious and other interests as "Useful Idiots"; Trotskyist in their entryism, and in their belief in the permanent revolution; and yet also Stalinist in their belief that the dictatorship of the victorious class (the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat) must be established in a superstate and then spread, including by force of arms, throughout a world in which vanguard élites owe their patriotic allegiance to that superstate rather than to their own respective countries.
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. Strauss's and Rand's thought dovetail horrifically with Leninis vanguard élitism, while the Marxist concept of "revolutionary truth" also corresponds only too closely to Strauss's belief taht his followers being the élite, had and have a positive duty to deceive the common herd.
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 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 neoconservatives' 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, in Bosnia (against Europe's real age-old bulwark against Islam) and in Kosovo (likewise). It remains so in Chechnya, in Saudi Arabia and in Pakistan.
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 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 is its historic 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.
OK, but that doesn't say anything about what neoconservatism is. It criticises neoconservatism, but without explaining it - I think I'd have to know a lot about it already to understand the critique, and so I don't understand it. Again, please explain: what is neoconservatism?
ReplyDeleteThanks.
I will answer this one, but for now ask readers to note that I have just been looking up books on the subject of neoconservatism on Amazon, only to find 'Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography' by Richard Stirling. For now, I leave you with that thought.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that David uses "neoconservative" as a term of abuse, and assumes that it necessarily means "liar". He's never shown why this is the case. Even if some neoconservatives are liars, that wouldn't mean that neoconservatism entails lying. People who use political categories as if they can be used straightforwardly as terms of abuse are usually sloppy thinkers.
ReplyDeleteDavid certainly is, as anyone who reads this blog will testify.
Neoconseravtives believe in lying on principle. They believe themselves to be the elite, with a duty to decive the common herd. They got this from Lenin, via Trotsky, via Shachtman. And they got it from Ayn Rand and, above all, Leo Strauss.
ReplyDeleteIndeed, Strauss, whom the neocons regard as their great sage, said little or nothing else of the slightest note; so they actually regard their ideology, from the inisde and with pride, as little or nothing except the preservation of their own elite status by lying to the rest of us.