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Old January 27th, 2013 #1
Alex Linder
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Default (#1 Thread) Neoconservatism and Neoconservatives

Krauthammer licks his wounds...
Posted by Christopher Manion on January 26, 2013 02:27 PM

... and pouts that people are calling him names. He's not a "neoconservative," he tells fellow loser Rich Lowry. "Neoconservative is an 'epithet.' Today [he continues] it’s usually meant as a silent synonym for ‘Jewish conservative.’ And when it is meant otherwise, I would ask you whenever you hear the word [to] challenge the person to describe and explain to you what a neocon is."

Poor Doc. I don't blame him for ducking the neocon label -- it's as closely identified with failure as "Bush" is. Moreover, Dr. K's tawdry taunt comes off as somewhat insincere, considering how, ten years ago, he had no time for explanations, brushing off Bush's critics as "navel gazers" because they insisted on applying constitutional principles his illegal, unconstitutional wars.

Down is up.

Well, then, who are the "neocons"? To begin with, Krauthammer and a small group of other well-compensated neocons are the "conservatives" appointed by the media on the Left -- because, as we will see, they both speak the same language, the dialectic. The Left loves them because the neocon wrecking crew has been wrong on virtually every foreign policy issue for the past ten years, conveniently making conservatives and Republicans look as dumb as the neocons are.

But wait, are we ducking the good doctor's "challenge"? No way. He smugly assumes that his critics are as dumb as those poor misled conservatives who were duped by neocons like Cheney, Bush, Lowry, McGurn, (Michael) Novak, and other Christians who cheered on the criminals who plundered the country, ruined the conservative movement, and delivered the government to the Obamanites. But he's wrong.

The Doctor wants definitions? Let's start with Aristotle's "limits."


Like their Trotskyite forbears, neocons defy constitutional limits on presidential power (e.g., their embrace of the "unitary executive"). Neocons defy metaphysical limits on government and employ the dialectic (traditionally known as "lying") to stay in power, regardless of principle or party. They deny religious limits on government, a principle which is unique in history to Christendom; this denial opens the door to totalitarianism. William Kristol's baptism of Obama (also not a Jew, Doc) as a "born-again neocon" reflects another of their intellectual indulgences, the denial of Aristotle's principle of non-contradiction. They only criticize power when somebody else has it.

Neocons accept the dictum of Marx's Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach: they evade rational discussion, and demand action in the service of the ideological demand to change the world -- thus George W. Bush's mission to "rid the world of evil" (oops, there's that denial of metaphysics again). They are not religious fanatics -- often, they are not religious at all. They were to dupe several million anti-Catholic Dispensational Evangelical Christian Bush supporters (who haven't a clue about metaphysics but who want Armageddon now) into supporting the Iraq war as "God's will." Neocons embrace the Manichaean hubris of self-deification: their cause is perfect good, while every enemy (and critic) is "another Hitler," sheer evil. But the dialectic keeps rotating Hitlers -- Saddam, Osama, Ahmadinijad, and now Mokhtar Belmokhtar. Neocons also falsify history: for them, it's always 1938; disagree with them and you're Neville Chamberlain. "If you're not with us, you're against us."

Ideas have consequences, and bad ideas have very bad consequences. The neocon's self-divinization permits torture, lies (falsely attributing that right to Socrates and the "noble lie"), murder, death squads, empire, defiance of responsibility, hubris as virtue, power lust (libido dominandi; Augustine, City of God, Book I, Preface), lust for fame and glory (superbia vitae: 1 John 2:16), and collateral damage -- major league, big time.

Thus speak the neocons. And one last note, an essential: the neocons are always wrong; and they never, ever apologize.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/lewr...ml#more-131383
 
Old January 28th, 2013 #2
John in Woodbridge
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Neocons also have a tendency to co-opt liberal ideals:

"The democrats were the party of the KKK"

"Martin Luther King is my hero"

"You wouldn't let your daughter date a black guy"

"I support immigration"
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Old January 28th, 2013 #3
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Fox yidlickers go nuts over Hagel
http://lewrockwell.com/gottfried/gottfried130.html
 
Old March 1st, 2013 #4
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.

"If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it."


Gal Beckerman: The Neoconservative Persuasion

Kevin MacDonald: Thinking About Neoconservatism

Haaretz: The Iraq War was conceived by 25 jewish neocons


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Old March 1st, 2013 #5
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Adbusters: Why won't anyone say the neocons are jews?

Click here for Web Archive or click here for screen shots.


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Old May 5th, 2013 #6
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Kristol Clear

by Philip Giraldi, May 02, 2013

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It has been noted ironically by Justin Raimondo at antiwar and also by Scott McConnell over at The American Conservative how the neoconservative dominated American Committee for Peace in the Caucasus, which sees Chechens and other Central Asian Muslim militants as “freedom fighters” against Russian rule, exists side by side with other organizations like the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and the American Enterprise Institute that feature many of the same neoconservatives dedicated to restraining Political Islam while extirpating what they frequently describe as “Islamic fascism.” As is frequently the case with ideologically driven positions, the American neocon supporters of Chechen independence have failed to note that the Chechen nationalist uprising of the 1980s has now morphed into an Islamic based insurgency. The contradictory behavior is particularly glaring as Chechens have frequently been identified among al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and elsewhere and have carried out major terrorist operations in the Russian Confederation, highlighted by the killing of 186 schoolchildren at Beslan in September 2004. The friends of Chechnya response to the massacre has been to successfully pressure the State Department to provide political asylum and a government job for Ilyas Akhmadov, a rebel leader who might have been party to the terrorist attack, a bit of hypocrisy that the Russians have noted vis-à-vis Washington’s professed global war on terror.

The contradictions inherent in the neocon movement should not surprise anyone as they are anything but coherent on any subjects other than the need to use force to bring about regime change and their love of Israel. The neoconservatives are frequently referred to as “former Trotskyites,” a reference to their founding generation which attended the “intensely radical” City College in New York during the 1930s. Irving Kristol, the so-called father of neoconservatism, and his associates would occupy an alcove in the college cafeteria to discuss both politics and revolution. Those friends included literary critic Irving Howe, sociologist Daniel Bell, and sociologist Nathan Glazer. Though leftist radicals themselves, they were hostile to Joseph Stalin’s increasingly despotic rule in Russia and were much more drawn to the communism of Leon Trotsky, who was then in exile in Mexico. Trotsky advocated rule of the Soviet Union by a vanguard working class as part of a mass political movement that would engage in continuous revolution. As the struggle would ultimately involve the proletariat of all nations, this was perceived as a truly unending international revolution. Kristol carefully disconnected from any whiff of Soviet communism in the post Second World War environment, but he continued to believe in certain aspects of the Trotsky agenda even after he founded the movement that was later to be dubbed neoconservatism in the 1960s. He accepted military intervention to impose “democracy” and embraced the concept of continuous revolution, though he did not use that term as it had fallen out of favor.

Irving Kristol famously described his peers in the new movement as liberals who had been mugged by reality, understating his own radicalism, which went far beyond traditional liberalism. Kristol’s principal vehicle for propagating his views was Commentary magazine, which was then and still is a publication of the American Jewish Committee, so, from the start, Israel was a major preoccupation of the movement, which linked Israeli interests with demands for employment of American military power to create a real world environment supportive of what were perceived to be U.S. interests.

But neoconservatism would have died there, as a fringe movement, but for the emergence of a second generation that managed to insert itself into the federal government. The most prominent of these were Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz and several other future neocons were influenced by their time spent at the University of Chicago, where they came under the influence of Professor Leo Strauss. Strauss taught that the “perpetual deception of the citizens by those in power is critical because they need to be led, and they need strong rulers to tell them what’s good for them.” Many Strauss students later described themselves as “Straussians.”

It is sometimes suggested that Perle and Wolfowitz’s subsequent tenure as staffers for Washington Democratic Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson in the 1970s shaped their future political trajectories, but it is perhaps more probable that the reverse was true, that the arrival of Perle and Wolfowitz led to Jackson’s increased involvement in foreign policy. They likely used the Senator, a former truck driver frequently referred to as the Senator from Boeing, to advance their own agendas. As a Jackson staffer, Perle was the principal drafter of the 1974 Jackson-Vanik amendment to the 1972 Russian trade agreement which made the agreement contingent upon the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate. Though the amendment, which continued to be in effect until November 2012 when it was superseded by the Magnitsky bill, did not identify Soviet Jews explicitly, other ethnic minorities suffering under the Soviet yoke were de facto not considered to be the potential beneficiaries.

In addition to Perle and Wolfowitz, Elliott Abrams, and Douglas Feith were former aides to Jackson who switched parties and joined the first Ronald Reagan administration in 1981. They became particularly influential in the Defense Department, where Perle became Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. Perle used his position to godfather Feith into the Pentagon after the latter had been fired from the National Security Council due to suspicion that he had passed classified information to Israel. Wolfowitz meanwhile became head of policy planning staff at the State Department.

The neocons were not particularly favored under George H. W. Bush and left government when Bill Clinton became president. Most returned to academia or set up businesses to profit from their Pentagon and Israeli connections. Several drafted a memo in 1996 called “A Clean Break,” which advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu regarding the advisability of either destabilizing or changing regime in a number of Arab nations.

Many of the neocons returned to senior Pentagon and National Security Council positions under George W. Bush, including Wolfowitz and Feith as numbers two and three respectively at the Defense Department and Perle as Chairman of the Defense Policy Board. Then came 9/11. It was like a dream come true, providing an opportunity to pursue the neoconservative agenda of remaking the Muslim world along the lines of “A Clean Break.” Encouraging hostility towards Russia was also part of the program as Moscow was seen as a potential impediment to the neocon foreign policy, something that has proven to be true as Vladimir Putin has consistently opposed western intervention in Muslim countries. Russia, with its echoes of Soviet communism, also serves as a convenient “threat” to justify militarism more generally.

Since 2001, U.S. foreign policy has been dominated by neoconservative thinking under both Democratic and Republican presidencies, though the Democrats have modified it through their favored “humanitarian interventionism.” It has spawned any number of “American Committees” like that supporting the Chechens, to include groups focused on Iraq, Georgia (“we are all Georgians now”), Syria, Sudan, Libya, and Iran. All the committees feature feckless politicians and apparatchiks like John Bolton, Madeleine Albright, John McCain, and Lindsey Graham but the organizers are inevitably the neocons themselves. Bill Kristol, on the board of the Caucasus “peace” group, is joined there by Elliott Abrams, Kenneth Adelman, Midge Decter, Frank Gaffney, Michael Ledeen, and James Woolsey.

The neocon foreign policy team always advocates using maximum military force whenever a threat surfaces, unless one is designated a freedom fighter a la the Chechens, a status that is never awarded to the Palestinians or Hamas or Hezbollah. It also does not eschew turning a buck by engaging in advocacy for the unsupportable, to include substantial speaking honoraria from the terrorist group Mujaheddin e Khalq (MEK), which they have now succeeded in having removed from the U.S. government terrorist list in spite of the fact that the MEK has killed Americans.

Such “my enemy’s enemy” thinking forged an alliance with Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, who produced many of the lies that led to the senseless war with Iraq and who later spied against the United States on behalf of Iran. It has spawned an endless occupation in Afghanistan, something approaching a failed state in Pakistan, a disastrous war between Georgia and Russia, a whole flock of pastel revolutions in Eastern Europe that have produced little in the way of real democracy, a failed intervention in Libya, destabilization of Yemen and Somalia, a civil war in Syria that is spilling over into neighboring Lebanon, and the threat of a catastrophic war with Iran. Many of the positions being advocated not surprisingly confuse Israel’s interests with those of the United States, note particularly the current posturing regarding Iran and Syria. In spite of all their egregious failures, the neocons continue to enjoy excellent access to the media to peddle their nonsense.

Which brings us back to the Kristols. It would be possible, though laborious, to go through the list of prominent neocons and observe what they are doing now. All are prospering, thank you very much, and most are still taken seriously inside the beltway. Bill Kristol, who might perhaps be considered the heir to his father’s mantle, could be considered a good example of what they do and how they operate. Kristol is inter alia the founder and editor of the political magazine The Weekly Standard and a regular commentator on the Fox News Channel.

In addition to his advocacy on behalf of Chechnya, Kristol is associated with a number of prominent conservative think tanks, including the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, where he serves on the Leadership Council. He was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the presidency of George H. W. Bush and later served as chairman of the New Citizenship Project from 1997 to 2005. In 1997, he was a co-founder of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) with fellow neocon Robert Kagan. A director of the Foreign Policy Initiative, Kristol is also one of the three board members of Keep America Safe, co-founded by Liz Cheney and Debra Burlingame, and is on the board of the Emergency Committee for Israel.

Kristol believes that some people who kill children are not really terrorists because it very much depends on who is being attacked. On March 29, 2010, after two Chechen women suicide bombers set off huge explosions in subway stations in central Moscow, killing more than three dozen people, he said that the Russians “in some ways have brought” the terrorism “on themselves,” a judgment that he would be unlikely to make regarding either Israel or the United States.

In March 2011, Kristol penned an editorial for The Weekly Standard entitled “The Party of Freedom.” It was written on the eve of the U.S. intervention in Libya. It begins “And so, despite his doubts and dithering, President Obama is taking us to war in another Muslim country. Good for him.” It goes on to claim “Our invasions have in fact been liberations…in our own national interest, of course, but also to protect Muslim peoples and help them free themselves. Libya will be America’s fifth war of Muslim liberation.”

One is tempted to ask what American interest was served by invading Libya and to challenge how much “Muslim liberation” Kristol really wants to see as truly free Muslims might not like Israel a whole lot. The idiocy of his panegyric on America’s willingness to go to war to fix the Muslim problem is actually quite sickening but it is the same logic that places Kristol at the head of an organization that supports terrorism as long as it is directed against someone else, in this case Russia. The essential contradiction of American foreign policy neocon style is on open display and one has only to ask why Kristol does not consider the two young Chechens in Boston to be freedom fighters when they set off a bomb that blew up an eight year old boy. The carnage that Kristol and his friends have been cheerleading in a series of Muslim countries has borne bitter fruit and perhaps it’s time to end the hypocrisy.

http://original.antiwar.com/giraldi/...kristol-clear/
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Old August 6th, 2013 #7
Alex Linder
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Newt Gingrich: Maybe These Interventions Haven’t Worked

By Thomas E. Woods Jr.

Tom Woods.com

August 6, 2013

Newt Gingrich now admits that neoconservative foreign-policy interventionism has backfired. “It may be that our capacity to export democracy is a lot more limited than we thought,” the former Speaker said.

(Before I get to the significance of this, one quick point: Gingrich says expressly, “I am a neoconservative.” I got a chuckle out of this, because it called to mind all the times we’ve been told that there’s no such thing as a neoconservative, that the term was originated by anti-Semites who use it to demonize Jews, but that there really is no such thing. And here’s a guy who actually admits he is one. So they aren’t just figments of our imaginations after all!)

At this point in his life, Gingrich’s influence is not great. What matters about the concessions he makes to the Washington Times is that he depicts himself as someone who sympathizes with Rand Paul, who is on the less interventionist side of the GOP. He condemns the establishment for responding with hysteria to noninterventionist arguments, and says the hysteria conceals the fact that the interventionists are out of arguments.

Is Gingrich an opportunist? We know the answer. But his remarks, and his eagerness to be perceived as a maverick who rethinks neoconservative interventionism, is an indication of the way the wind is blowing.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/08/t...n-paul
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Old January 15th, 2014 #8
Alex Linder
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neocon John PodHORetz doesn't want to hear any criticism of israel, not even at an all-jews panel

http://gawker.com/john-podhoretz-got...hes-1484702118
 
Old February 9th, 2014 #9
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American Deep State

From Mondoweiss in 2011:

No problem– Obama’s State Dep’t spokesperson is married to Romney’s neocon foreign policy adviser

Philip Weiss on October 12, 2011

Here is a crazy story no one is talking about that is evidence of the Israel lobby’s role in our politics. Last week, Mitt Romney announced a foreign policy team that includes Robert Kagan, a neocon who pushed for the Iraq war.

But Kagan is married to Victoria Nuland, who is a spokesperson for the State Department.

Nuland is now in charge of -- in effect -- overthrowing the elected government of Ukraine and replacing it with the opposition figure of her choice, all in the name of the E.U., of course.

Laurie Bennett notes the strangeness of this conjunction:

Victoria Nuland’s role as spokesperson for the State Department, deemed strange by some who remember her tenure as principal deputy national security adviser to then Vice President Dick Cheney, has become stranger yet.

Her husband, Robert Kagan, has joined Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign as a foreign policy adviser.

Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, also advised the McCain campaign in 2008.

Ordinarily this would cause a lot of strain. Nuland would be under pressure. Chris Matthews would be asking what the heck she’s doing in a political job at State when her husband is preparing the opposition.

But in fact, Nuland’s Cheney resume and her marriage to Kagan are actually credentials in the Democratic Party: they demonstrate Obama’s sensitivity to the Israel lobby. And party bosses are happy to have these playing cards now that Obama is under siege from his own party about Israel.

Robert in only one of four Kagans who are currently esteemed foreign policy intellectuals: his father Donald, brother Fred, and sister-in-law Kimberly.

The Kagan-Nuland ascendancy seems strange, but it's hardly unprecedented. I recently read Gore Vidal's 1987 historical novel Empire about Washington DC from 1898 to 1905. The central character is the Secretary of State, John Hay, who got his start when his next door neighbor, Abe Lincoln, was elected president in 1860 and needed a second secretary. Although a smalltown Midwestern boy, Hay was a charming, witty fellow more like a British than an American statesman.

Hay's best friend was historian Henry Adams, great-grandson of the second President. Henry's younger brother Brooks Adams is portrayed as Teddy Roosevelt's idea man: along with Admiral Mahan, Brooks is the chief theoretician of the spasm of American imperialism that garnered the U.S. the Philippines and Puerto Rico (for whatever they're worth). Hay and Henry Adams laugh at the bumptiousness of Teddy and Brooks Adams, but tend to wind up going along with them.

In whatever [Brooks Adams] wrote he showed a gift for generalization with a tendency to carry it beyond reasonable bounds.

Brooks' ultimate goal is America gaining control of the coal of northern China. Vidal has some fun with Brooks' intensity and steampunk strategizing: The nation that controls the coal of northern China will control the world! Still, Vidal, speaking through the annoyed but often agreeing Henry Adams, can't really make up his mind whether Brooks Adams was a dangerous loon or a prophet or both. True, the coal of northern China isn't all that important in 1987, but the oil of the Persian Gulf turned out to be, so maybe Brooks was prescient after all. Or maybe it wasn't worth it. Perhaps it's too soon to tell.

So, in 1901 if you asked who made up the American deep state, you'd probably start with the Adams brothers: the president is listening to Brooks and the secretary of state to Henry.

Influential foreign policy intellectuals and operatives tend to come from a pretty limited set of elite families, and they get a lot done by having access. And if they screw up, well, blood is thicker than competence. These relatives don't always get along with each other, but it's hard to tell what's going on without keeping track of families.

Neocons tend to be particularly inbred. In the comments at Mondoweiss, Sean McBride lists some examples (I'll cut out redundant ones):

2. Andrew Rosenthal is the son of A.M. Rosenthal.
4. Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is the son of Arthur Sulzberger.
5. Barbara Amiel is the wife of Conrad Black.
6. Barbara Ledeen is the mother of Simone Ledeen who is the daughter of Michael Ledeen.
8. Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of Benzion Netanyahu.
11. Dalck Feith is the father of Douglas Feith.
14. Daniel Feith is the brother of David Feith.
15. Daniel Feith is the grandson of Dalck Feith.
17. Daniel Pipes is the son of Richard Pipes.
21. David Wurmser is the husband of Meyrav Wurmser.
22. Dick Cheney is the father of Liz Cheney who is the daughter of Lynne Cheney.
24. Donald Kagan is the father-in-law of Victoria Nuland and Kimberly Kagan
25. Donald Kagan is the father of Frederick and Robert Kagan.
26. Donald Kagan is the father of Robert Kagan.
31. Elliott Abrams is the son-in-law of Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz, and brother-in-law of John Podhoretz.
38. Gertrude Himmelfarb is the wife of Irving Kristol and the mother of William Kristol.
45. Jonah Goldberg is the son of Lucianne Goldberg.

Neoconservatism: it's a real family business.

http://isteve.blogspot.com/2014/02/a...medium=twitter
 
Old September 1st, 2015 #10
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Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?

This article first appeared in 1997 in The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Not long after the Central Intelligence Agency was founded in 1947, the American public and the world were subjected to an unprecedented level of propaganda in the service of US foreign policy objectives in the Cold War. The propaganda offensive of the government centered around its obsession with securing the emerging US-dominated world order in the wake of the Second World War. It was a time when Europe lay in ruins and when subservience to US planners, in government and business, was the order of the day.

Although it is now widely conceded that there was never any serious threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, let alone of the United States, the menace of the Soviet Union was the pretext underlying discussion of foreign policy. To pay for the Cold War, Harry Truman set out, as Arthur Vandenberg advised, to "Scare the Hell out of the American people." A daunting task, considering the years of pro-Soviet accolades that had been previously flowing from the executive branch.

Nonetheless, the Soviet threat served as a useful chimera to keep the masses in line. What were the targets singled out for demonization in the Cold War propaganda campaign? One of the chief aims of the government was to discredit dangerously parochial attitudes about the desirability of peace. It was also thought necessary to inoculate the public, particularly in Europe, against the virus of "neutralism."

Further, since the American government had successfully entrenched the military industrial complex as a permanent feature of American life, US planners were eager to discredit the idea of "disarmament," which meant not only a rejection of the techniques of mass murder developed and perfected by the Allied powers in the Second World War, but also a return to the pre-war days when the union of government and business was more tenuous, government-connected profits were fleeting, and market discipline provided a check on consolidation.

The degree to which the press participated as a partner in the rhetoric of the Cold War was no accident. Media penetration was a major facet of CIA activities in both the foreign and domestic context. At its peak, the CIA allocated 29 percent of its budget to "media and propaganda." The extent of its efforts are difficult to measure, but some information has slipped through the shroud of secrecy.

One report notes that the media organizations funded by the CIA in Europe included: the West German News agency DENA (later the DPA), the writers association PEN in Paris, a number of French newspapers, the International Forum of Journalists, and Forum World Features. The London-based Forum World Features provided stories to "140 newspapers around the world, including about 30 in the United States, amongst which were the Washington Post and four other major dailies."

The US Senate’s Church committee reported that the Post was aware that the service was "CIA-controlled." German media tycoon Axel Springer had received the then-substantial sum of more than $7 million from the Agency to build his press empire. His relationship with the CIA was reported to have extended through the 1970s. The New York Times reported that the CIA owned or subsidized more than 50 newspapers, news services, radio stations, and periodicals. The paper reported that at least another dozen were infiltrated by the CIA; more than 1,000 books either written directly or subsidized by the Agency were published during this period.

The penetration of CIA propaganda into the American press was far more extensive than an occasional distorted report from Europe. By the early 70s, it had been revealed that the head of the Hearst bureau in London was a CIA agent. Some suspicion was aroused among those editors not on the Company payroll, and inquiring minds among them wanted to know if CIA men were currently in their employ. Soon thereafter the Washington Star-News published a report claiming that some three-dozen journalists were on the payroll of the Agency. One agent was identified in the story as a member of the Star-News’ own staff. When the paper went belly up in 1981, the "journalist" in question went directly to work for the Reagan administration. Later, he joined the staff of the Washington Times.

Though pressured, the CIA refused for some time to release information on its tentacles in the "free press." There’s little wonder why. When George Bush assumed the role of CIA director, he agreed to a single paragraph summary of each of its journalists for the Church committee. When it submitted the last of its data, the CIA had provided information on more than 400 journalists. The final Church report was a disappointment, having been audited by the CIA. A subsequent House investigation was suppressed, though a leak it was published in the Village Voice. The House report indicated that Reuters news service was frequently used for CIA disinformation, and that media manipulation may have been the "largest single category of covert action projects taken by the CIA." According to the watchdog group Public Information Resource, propaganda expenses in the 70s may have exceeded $285 million a year. This was more than "the combined budgets of Reuters, United Press International, and the Associated Press."

By the late seventies, reports emerged that the publishing house Copley Press had for three decades served as a CIA front. Its subsidiary, Copley News Service, provided the CIA a mouthpiece in Latin America. Propaganda in Latin America was more or less constant, as the CIA influenced elections, organized the torture and murder of dissidents, including priests, and backed brutal, but pro-American patsies throughout the region.

The efforts in manipulation of opinion in Latin America were reflected in similar campaigns at home. For instance: pro-contra public relations specialist Edgar Chamorro served as a conduit of disinformation from 1982 to 1984, manipulating journalists and Congressmen at the behest of the CIA. Though domestic propaganda is a violation of the law, it was a standard Agency tactic.

The Carter administration, in an effort to soften public interest in the CIA’s involvement with the press, issued an executive order touted in the media as a ban on the manipulation of the American media. Belatedly, as another PIR report notes, the Society of Professional Journalists had this to say—"An executive order during the Carter administration was thought to have banned the practice [of recruitment of journalists by the CIA]. After a Council on Foreign Relations task force recommended that the ban be reconsidered, it was revealed that a ‘loophole’ existed allowing the CIA director or his deputy to grant a waiver." As a follow-up, the Reagan administration signed a law banning media disclosure of covert operations as a felony.

If reporters were often led to compromise their integrity at the behest of the warfare state, it was an example set at the highest levels of power in the American media. Press ownership, already concentrated to a ludicrous degree, shared a cozy relationship with the CIA from its start. Those chummy with the Company included Time-Life magnate Henry Luce, former Post owner Philip Graham and assorted New York Times owners in the Sulzberger family. Top editors of the Post and Newsweek have also served as agents, while the Post’s intelligence reporter was on the take from the CIA in the 60s. Katherine Graham, for decades owner of the Washington Post, had this to say to top CIA officials as the Berlin Wall was starting to crack. "There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn’t. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

The conservative movement that culminated in the elevation of Ronald Reagan to the presidency was a product of those turbulent Cold War years, and perhaps more so a product of domestic intervention by the security state than many of its participants would care to admit. The armchair warriors in the neoconservative camp and the inveterate interventionists at National Review can both trace their roots straight back to the propaganda efforts of the CIA.

After the Hitler-Stalin pact, the neoconservatives moved from cafeteria Trotskyites to apologists for the US warfare state without missing a beat, as Justin Raimondo shows in his 1993 Reclaiming the American Right. The CIA’s role in establishing the influence of the neocons came out in the late 60s, though the revelations were obscured by the primary actors’ denials of knowledge of the covert funding. The premiere organization of the anti-Stalinist left, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, provided a base of operations to launch a left-intellectual crusade against the Soviet Union. The revelation that the Congress was a CIA front destroyed the organization’s credibility, and it went belly up despite the best efforts of the Ford Foundation to keep it afloat. The Congress disappeared, but as Raimondo notes, "the core group later came to be known as the neoconservatives."

The Congress for Cultural Freedom was perhaps the Agency’s most ambitious attempt at control and influence of intellectual life throughout Europe and the world. Affiliates were established in America, Europe, Australia, Japan, Latin America, India, and Africa, although its appeal was limited in the Third World for obvious reasons. It combined concerts, conferences, and publishing efforts, promoting the State Department line on the Cold War. Magazines affiliated with the Congress included, among others, the China Quarterly, the New Leader and, of course, Encounter.

The funding of the Congress and similar fronts was organized through dozens of charitable trusts and nonprofit foundations, some of which were invented by the CIA. The money was made available through seemingly legitimate means to the Congress, as well as to political parties (including the German Social Democrats), unions and labor organizations, journalists’ unions, student groups, and any number of other organizations that could be counted on to support US hegemony in Europe and the world.

The most complete story of the CIA and the Congress for Cultural Freedom is found in Peter Coleman’s apologetic book, The Liberal Conspiracy. Coleman, a former Australian barrister and editor of the Congress magazine, the Quadrant, lets slip quite a bit of revelatory information in his analysis of the Congress’s activities and its relationship to the CIA. The common targets of Congress literature, as Coleman notes, are familiar: the literature was anti-Communist, social democratic, and anti-neutralist. Other aims promoted by the Congress were cataloged by William Blum: "a strong, well-armed, and united Western Europe, allied to the United States....support for the Common Market and NATO and...skepticism of disarmament [and] pacifism. Criticism of US foreign policy took place within the framework of cold war assumptions; for example that a particular American intervention was not the most effective way of combating communism, not that there was anything wrong with intervention per se...." F.A. Hayek commented that the Congress’ strategic agenda was "not to plan the future of freedom, but to write its obituary."

Among those involved with the Congress were James Burnham, Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Daniel Bell, Arthur Schlesinger, Lionel Trilling, and the self-described "life-long Menshevik" Sidney Hook. After World War Two, Kristol worked as the editor for the American Jewish Committee’s Commentary magazine, then served as editor of Encounter from 1953 to 1958.

The Congress was organized by Kristol’s boss and CIA man Michael Josselson, who maintained a tight grip on the activities of the Congress as well as the content of its publications. According to Coleman, Josselson’s criteria for his editors was simple: they had to be reliable on the State Department line. Later, Kristol was to deny he knew the organization was a front. This seems unlikely for several reasons. For one, Sidney Hook stated that "like almost everyone else," he had heard that "the CIA was making some contribution to the financing of the Congress." More to the point, as Tom Braden, then head of the CIA’s International Organizations division, wrote in a Saturday Evening Post article, a CIA agent always served as editor of Encounter. Today, Kristol is a kind of svengali in the modern conservative world.

Neoconservative prominence and influence owes quite a bit to the covert activities of this government, something they forget only rarely, as with the case of neocon Richard Perle who was caught funneling information to one of our "reliable allies" while in the Reagan administration.

While waging the CIA’s battle, the neocons were not yet billing themselves as conservatives. But the National Review was another matter, a journal aimed specifically at the American right wing. The official line holds that National Review was founded in an intellectual vacuum, and, for all intents and purposes, created conservatism in America. But events, as are most often the case, were not that simple. The idea for National Review originated with Willi Schlamm, a hard-line interventionist and feature editor with the Old Right Freeman. At odds with the isolationism of the right, Schlamm was well-known for his belligerence, having demanded that the United States go to war over Formosa.

One person in a position to know more details about the founding of NR was the late classicist and right-winger Revilo Oliver. Although late in life Oliver was associated most closely with extremist racialism, in the 50s, he was an influential member of the Buckley inner circle, a regular contributor to National Review and a member of Bill Buckley’s wedding party. Later, he went on to serve as a founding board member of the John Birch Society, until his break with the Society’s founder Robert Welch.

In his autobiography, Oliver explains that the National Review was conceived as a way to put the isolationist Freeman out of business. A surreptitious deal was cut with one of the Freeman editors (presumably Schlamm) to turn the magazine over to Buckley; a last-ditch effort saved the magazine, and control was assumed by Leonard E. Read, president of the Foundation for Economic Education. Unfortunately, Read balked at "politics," i.e., analyzing and criticizing government actions, and the magazine quickly slipped into irrelevance.

It’s hard to blame the editors of the Freeman for failing to see Buckley’s treachery coming. As late as 1954, Buckley was denouncing the US military as incompatible with a free society. Soldiers emerging from the armed forces, Buckley argued, were brainwashed with militaristic platitudes. In his essay, Buckley proposed a debriefing regime for all military men "solely based on the great libertarian documents of our civilization" and study of the lives of the world’s "great individualists." But, as they say, the times, they were a changin’.

Buckley’s decision to launch the National Review was a watershed event on the right by any measure. As Buckley’s admiring social-democratic biographer John Judis notes, "Except for Chodorov, who was a Buckley family friend, none of the right-wing isolationists were included on National Review’s masthead. While this point of view had been welcome in the Freeman, it would not be welcome, even as a dissenting view, in National Review."

As Judis notes, Schlamm, who envisioned himself as the guiding light behind NR, was not even a conservative. He "had more in common with Dwight MacDonald or Daniel Bell than with Robert McCormick; Buckley was turning his back on much of the isolationist...Old Right that had applauded his earlier books and that his father had been politically close to."

Buckley, by 1955, had already been in deep cover for the CIA. While there is some confusion as to the actual duration of Buckley’s service as an agent, Judis notes that he served under E. Howard Hunt of Watergate fame in Mexico City in 1951. Buckley was directed to the CIA by Yale Professor Wilmoore Kendall, who passed Buckley along to James Burnham, then a consultant to the Office Of Policy Coordination, the CIA’s covert-action wing.

Buckley apparently had a knack for spying: before his stint with the Agency, he had served as an on-campus informant for the FBI, feeding God only knows what to Hoover’s political police. In any case, it is known that Buckley continued to participate at least indirectly in CIA covert activities through the 60s.

The founding circle of National Review was composed largely of former agents or men otherwise in the pay of the CIA, including Buckley, Kendall, and Burnham. Wall Street lawyer William Casey, rooted in OSS activities and later to be named director of the CIA, drew up the legal documents for the new magazine. (He also helped transfer Human Events from isolationist to interventionist hands.)

NR required nearly half a million to get off the ground; the only substantial contribution known was from Will Buckley, Senior: $100,000. It’s long been rumored that CIA black funds were used to start the magazine, but no hard evidence exists to establish it. It may also be relevant that the National Review was organized as a nonprofit venture, as covert funding was typically channeled through foundations.

By the 70s, it was known that Buckley had been an agent. More imaginative right-wingers accused Buckley of complicity in everything from the assassination of JFK to the Watergate break-in, undoubtedly owing to his relationship with the mysterious Hunt.

But sober minds also believed that something was suspicious about the National Review. In a syndicated column, Gary Wills wondered, "Was National Review, with four ex-agents of the CIA on its staff, a CIA operation? If so, the CIA was stingy, and I doubt it – but even some on the editorial board raised the question. And the magazine supported Buckley’s old CIA boss, Howard Hunt, and publicized a fund drive for him." In reply, Buckley denounced Wills for being a classicist. But others close to the founding circle of National Review nurtured similar suspicions. Libertarian "fusionist" Frank Meyer, for example, confided privately that he believed that the National Review was a CIA front.

If it was, then it was the federal government that finally broke the back of the populist and isolationist right, the mass-based movement with its roots in the America First anti-war movement. What FDR tried and failed to do when he sought to shut down the Chicago Tribune, when his attorney general held mass sedition trials of his critics on the right, and when he orchestrated one of the worst smear campaigns in US history against his conservative opponents, the CIA accomplished. That in itself ought to lead conservatives to oppose the existence of executive agencies engaged in covert operations.

Today, the war-mongering right is self-sustaining. Money flows like milk and honey to neoconservative activists from the major conservative foundations. Irving’s son Bill Kristol has his sugar daddy in the form of media tycoon and alien Rupert Murdoch. National Review is boring, but in no danger of going under financially.

But the cozy relationship with the federal government is the same. Neocons Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan now insist on massive extensions of the warfare state. The Weekly Standard demands a ground war to topple the head of a foreign government unfriendly to Israel, while denouncing right-wing isolationism, libertarianism, and Murray Rothbard.

This time, the right-wing War Hawks face a potentially insurmountable challenge. The pro-war propaganda directed at the domestic population is failing badly. It is ineffective for two principle reasons: mounting intellectual opposition to the warfare state and the return of grassroots isolationism. Both trends have come to the fore. And not only with the collapse of communism. Widespread public disillusionment exists over the Gulf War of 1991. Sold to the public as a high-tech "virtual" war, the consequences have been harder to hide than the execution of the attack. With over a million Iraqis dead, Hussein still in power, US soldiers apparently poisoned by their own government and a not so far-fetched feeling that the public was duped into supporting an unjust slaughter, people are starting to regard the Gulf War as an outrage. And they are right.

At the height of the Cold War, opposition to interventionism was largely isolated to the anti-war Left. While marshaling an impressive analytic literature on the evils of US imperialism, particularly in the context of Viet Nam, the Left was suspect for its support of socialism and its sometimes overt sympathies for totalitarian regimes. On the right, things were different. Except for a noble band of libertarians lead by Murray Rothbard, conservatives and many libertarians were front and center in support of the security state and its nefarious activities. Now, virtually the entire right is opposed to interventionism. Traditionalists and even nationalist right-wingers are generally opposed to foreign military actions. The dominant anti-war force on the right is the growing number of explicitly isolationist libertarians, who want no truck with the warfare state on principle. The Weekly Standard acknowledged as much and identified Murray Rothbard as the guiding spirit behind today’s antistatist, antiwar movement. And the nonliberal left, lead by long-time noninterventionists like Noam Chomsky, remains opposed to US global hegemony. The neocons and their corporate liberal cronies are the only spokesman for militarism.

The grassroots are hated by the neocons for precisely that reason. The man on the street, the movement conservative, the Perot voter, the Libertarian Party man – they all want the troops brought home and the tyranny of the US empire brought to a halt. When the leaders of the empire try to talk down to normal people, they are jeered off the stage. The RRR position – no more war – is more and more the position of the American people. That’s a strike for peace and a strike for liberty.

Copyright © 1997 by the Center for Libertarian, Studies, Inc.

http://www.informationclearinghouse....rticle3700.htm
 
Old September 2nd, 2015 #11
Crowe
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Originally Posted by Robbie Key View Post
Neoconservatism: a CIA Front?

This article first appeared in 1997 in The Rothbard-Rockwell Report.

Although it is now widely conceded that there was never any serious threat of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe, let alone of the United States, the menace of the Soviet Union was the pretext underlying discussion of foreign policy. To pay for the Cold War, Harry Truman set out, as Arthur Vandenberg advised, to "Scare the Hell out of the American people." A daunting task, considering the years of pro-Soviet accolades that had been previously flowing from the executive branch.
What's underlined is the exact same thing they're doing today to justify their warmongering and pointless wars in the middle east. They use boogeymen like Al Queda and ISIS to make sure the sheeple keep wetting their pants, who will eventually start demanding action be taken. And we can't forget Russia and Putin. Most of the sheeple think hes the "anti-christ". And the USA is protecting Ukraine from "soviet commies", but I wonder how they'd feel if they knew the USA was supporting *gasp* nazis!!!

The USA's foreign policy is pursuing a Zionist Imperialist agenda, while at the same time making sure White countries get their fair share of diversity. We can't have some country that most people have never heard of abusing faggots, now can we? America's foreign policy is about attacking the enemies of jews and Israel. That would be White countries - by pushing cultural marxism and non-White immigrants, while creating problems for any nation near Israel that doesn't tow the line. They destroyed perfectly stable and successful regimes, like Iraq, Libya, and Syria that are now chaotic and created a refugee problem where White European countries are expected to take millions of non-White refugees. From a jewish perspective, this is knocking out 2 birds with one stone. And there is no fucking way this is a coincidence either. To European lurkers - the USA and Israel is to blame for your refugee problems.

Neoconservatism is about keeping people subscribed to the above agenda. While pushing cultural marxism at home. From an ideological standpoint, it doesn't get any more pro-jew than neoconservatives.

The Russians are still the biggest threat to the USA according to green nigger general Joseph Dunford. I think its curious why he'd sway away from what seems like the current norm of demanding action against ISIS. Is this acknowledgement by a US General, that the ISIS threat is not as severe as the media is claiming?

Last edited by Crowe; September 2nd, 2015 at 01:24 PM.
 
Old October 29th, 2015 #12
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Published on October 26th, 2015 | by Jim Lobe

Neocons Launch 2016 Manifesto

by Jim Lobe

A mostly neoconservative group of national-security analysts have published perhaps the first comprehensive outline of what they believe a Republican foreign policy should look like as of Inauguration Day 2017. It’s titled “Choosing to Lead: American Foreign Policy for a Disordered World.” Although it concedes that “there are limitations on American power,” according to the book’s “Forward” by former George W. Bush speechwriter, Peter Wehner, all of the contributors

Quote:
…understand, too, that with the right leadership and policies in place, the United States can once again be a guarantor of global order and peace, a champion of human rights, and a beacon of economic growth and human flourishing. There is no reason the 21st century cannot be the next American Century. …Choosing to Lead offers perspectives and recommendations on how to make the next American Century happen. In doing so, we believe it will serve the world as well as the United States of America.[Emphasis added.]
If you sense a rebirth of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), you’re probably not far off, although Bob Kagan and Bill Kristol, who co-founded PNAC, are not among the large number of contributors. PNAC published two volumes, Present Dangers and Rebuilding American Defenses, that together formed a neocon manifesto for the Republican presidential candidate in the 2000 election in which the organization initially backed John McCain.

John Hay Initiative

The new compilation is the product of the John Hay Initiative, named after Theodore Roosevelt’s chief diplomat, and brings together many of the foreign-policy advisers to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. The Initiative is co-chaired by Eliot Cohen (a charter member of PNAC), former Romney adviser Brian Hook, and Eric Edelman (who succeeded Doug Feith as undersecretary of defense under George W. Bush and has since served as co-founder and director—with Kagan and Kristol—of PNAC’s lineal descendant, the Foreign Policy Initiative). The 200 “experts” connected to the Initiative have reportedly advised almost all of the 2016 Republican presidential candidates.

The Initiative has made no secret of its hope that a successful Republican presidential candidate will appoint many of its members to senior policy-making positions (much as PNAC’s charter members, such as Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Elliott Abrams, were all rewarded with senior posts under George W. Bush. Cohen positioned himself for an appointment in that administration by writing the perfectly timed book, Supreme Command, in the run-up to the Iraq invasion about how the best wartime presidents ignored the more cautious advice of their generals. A faithful signer of PNAC’s letters, Cohen was named counsel to Condoleezza Rice in Bush’s second term.

In a chapter entitled “Rebuilding American Foreign Policy,” Cohen, Edelman, and Hook offer the predictable Republican/neocon critique of current U.S. foreign policy. They describe what they are against and hint—albeit not explicitly—that maybe the Bush administration may have made some mistakes.

Quote:
U.S. foreign policy today is failing every test that a great power’s foreign policy can fail. Today, America’s enemies do not fear the United States and America’s friends doubt that they can trust it. Neither the American people nor the world-at-large understands anymore either the purposes of American power or even, in some respects, the principles that shape them. Indeed, after a decade and a half of conflict in the Middle East and South Asia, some Americans have concluded that the best thing to do is to pull back from the world and its troubles. Some argue that America’s role as guarantor of global order is no longer necessary, history having ended with the Cold War; there are also those who think the United States is too clumsy and incompetent to do much of anything right; and there are, finally, those who think that “nation-building at home” is some kind of alternative to engagement abroad.

We disagree. We believe that a strong United States is essential to the maintenance of the open global order under which this country and the rest of the world have prospered since 1945; that the alternative is not a self-regulating machine of balancing states but a landscape marked by eruptions of chaos and destruction. We recognize the failures as well as the successes of past policies, because to govern is to choose, and to choose in the world as it is, is necessarily to err. But while we believe that we must understand those failures and learn from them, we also believe that American power and influence has, on the whole, served our country and the world far better than American weakness and introversion.[Emphasis added.]
In the same essay, the authors also assert that “the first principle of American foreign policy…should be prudence” given the fact that, among other things, the U.S. economy is not nearly as dominant in relative terms as it was after World War II. “Our resources will be finite, and so will be the ability of our leaders to focus on more than a few problems at a time.” It’s somewhat refreshing there’s no more talk here about being mightier than the Roman or British Empires. But they still believe that the U.S. should be the “guarantor of global order.”

Thus, they deem Beijing’s aspirations unacceptable and decry “replac[ing] the American-shaped order that enabled China’s ‘peaceful rise’ with a system in which we are only one of multiple, equal participants.” Russia, Iran, North Korea and “non-state actors—most notably, jihadi movements of several stripes”—also qualify as key threats. Unlike the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission and most other nuclear proliferation experts, the authors also believe that Iran’s “nuclear ambitions will not be blocked and, indeed, may even be eased by the Obama Administration’s misconceived deal with it.”

Although the authors do not believe that this is 1938, and Iran is Nazi Germany, they don’t hesitate to invoke the 1930s—the neocon touchstone for understanding just about any challenge to American power and prestige—to depict the present moment and the consequences that may be drawn from it:

Quote:
We do not yet face a cataclysm like that of the late 1930s. But it is fair to compare our era to that of the early 1930s, when the democratic powers seemed to have lost much of their military edge and, equally important, their self-confidence and will to use their power. At the same time, pitiless dictators and virulent ideologies were making use of new technologies to threaten, in ways previously inconceivable, the international order.
A New Generation

Most of the book’s contributors, unlike Cohen, were not associated with PNAC in its early years. This is a somewhat younger generation.

Nonetheless there are some golden oldies, too, most noteworthy Elliott Abrams who wrote the chapter 16 years ago on “Israel and the ‘Peace Process'” in Present Dangers. Abrams had the opportunity to put his ideas about the “peace process” (his quotation marks) into practice when he served as George W. Bush’s top Middle East aide on the on the National Security Council, and we can all see how that turned out. In light of his outstanding achievements in that position, the John Hay Initiative awarded him responsibility for writing the chapter on the entire “Middle East.” And, surprise, surprise, his views correspond almost precisely with those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, particularly in how to deal with Palestinians and on the overriding necessity of “defeating Iran’s regional ambitions.” Abrams, who was also in charge of democracy promotion under Bush, believes in establishing an alliance between the U.S., Israel, and Sunni-led (authoritarian) Arab states in an echo of the elusive “strategic consensus” sought 35 years ago by Alexander Haig after the Iranian revolution.

Another Present Dangers contributor and PNAC alumnus, Aaron Friedberg of the American Enterprise Institute, reprises his role as the Paul Revere of the China threat in a chapter entitled “A New China Strategy.” He served as Cheney’s top Asia adviser.

I couldn’t find any reference to “climate change” in the main chapters, which is consistent with Republican orthodoxy, but a more careful reading may find a reference.

If you want to see the likely foreign-policy worldview of a Republican administration, should one take office in 2017, Choosing to Lead offers a pretty reliable guide.

http://lobelog.com/neocons-launch-2016-manifesto/
 
Old November 4th, 2015 #13
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