@dotmatrix,
Let me introduce Leo Strauss. I will return to Zionist leaders quotes in 48 hours.
Professor Shadia Drury has made a career of shining light on the work of Leo Strauss. Strauss is the immediate God-Father of the American Neoconservative (Neocon) movement. Strauss masks his ideas in long winded discussions of the classics and is very difficult to read.
Strauss is Jewish by Tribal Identification. And he is fiercely Jewish in this sense. But he is atheist and believes that all morality is just a human foible. Great minds (like his) are unrestricted by moral principles, concerns about God, their soul, or the after-life.
Strauss
- admires Machiavelli as one of the greatest masters of public leadership.
- explains that the elite must lie to the public (whom he calls âthe vulgarsâ)
- Explains that the elite are a superior breed of humanity (âphilosophersâ) who must operate from the shadows and through proxies. This makes them most effective. This also allows them to avoid blowback when âthe vulgarsâ catch on to who is actually doing the leading. Most important: Strauss acted from the shadows to remain unnoticed.
An interview
From his book, Laurent Guyenot introduces the neoconservative movement.
Guyénot, Laurent. JFK-9/11: 50 Years of Deep State (p. 156)
Chapter 22. Twenty-five Machiavello-Zionists
The neoconservative movement, which is a radical (rather than âconservativeâ) Republican right, is, in reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary, a media arm of the American Jewish Committee, which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Jewish Daily Forward wrote in a January 6, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: âIf there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neo-conservatism is it.
Itâs a thought one imagines most American Jews, overwhelmingly liberal, will find horrifying. And yet it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neo-conservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrantsâ grandchildren.â The neoconservative apologist Murray Friedman explains the Jewish dominance within his movement by the inherent benevolence of Judaism, âthe idea that Jews have been put on earth to make it a better, perhaps even a holy, placeâ (The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy, 2006).[334]
Just as we speak of the âChristian Rightâ as a political force in the United States, we could also therefore speak of the neoconservatives as representing the âJewish Right.â However, this characterization is problematic for three reasons.
First, the neoconservatives are a relatively small group, although they have acquired considerable authority in Jewish representative organizationsâwhich are so numerous that their activities need to be coordinated by a Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, with a current list of 51 members. The neoconservatives compensate for their small number by multiplying their Committees, Projects, and other think tanks, which gives them a kind of ubiquity; in 2003, New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman could say of only twenty-five influential neocons: âif you had exiled them to a desert island a year and half ago, the Iraq war would not have happened.â[335]
Second, the neoconservatives of the first generation mostly came from the left, even the extreme Trotskyist [Neocons are the intellectual descendants of Leon Trotsky, of the Russian Red Terror Revolution] left for some luminaries like Irving Kristol, one of the main editors of Commentary.
During the late 1960s the Commentary editorial staff began to break with the liberal, pacifist left, which they suddenly deemed decadent. Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, was an anti-Vietnam War activist until 1967, but then in the 70s became a fervent advocate of an increased defense budget, bringing the journal along in his wake. In the 1980s, he opposed the policy of détente in his book The Present Danger. In the 1990s, he calls for the invasion of Iraq, and then again in the early 2000s. In 2007, while his son John Podhoretz was taking over as editor of Commentary, he asserted once again the urgency of a U.S. military attack, this time against Iran.
Third, unlike evangelical Christians who openly proclaim their unifying religious principles, neoconservatives do not display their Judaism. Whether theyâd been Marxists or not, they appear mostly non-religious (although quite a few are sons or grandsons of rabbis, and at least one, Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, is an ordained rabbi).
Their unifying ideology is mostly borrowed from Leo Strauss, so much so that they are sometimes referred to as âthe Straussiansâ [or âLeo-consâ]; Norman Podhoretz and his son John, Irving Kristol and his son William, Donald Kagan and his son Robert, Paul Wolfowitz, Adam Shulsky, all expressed their debt to Strauss.
Leo Strauss, born to a family of German Orthodox Jews, was both pupil and collaborator of political theorist Carl Schmitt, himself a specialist of Thomas Hobbes and advocate of a âpolitical theologyâ by which the State must appropriate the attributes of God.
Schmitt was an admirer of Mussolini, and [was] the legal counsel of the Third Reich. After the Reichstag fire in February 1933, it was Schmitt who provided the legal framework that justified the suspension of citizen rights and the establishment of the dictatorship. [Kind of like son-of-a-rabbi Micheal Chertoff did in the USA after 9/11.] It was also Schmitt who, in 1934, personally obtained from the Rockefeller Foundation a grant for Leo Strauss to study Thomas Hobbes in London and Paris, to then finally end up teaching in Chicago.[336]
The thinking of Leo Strauss is difficult to capture, and certainly beyond the purview of this work. Strauss is often elliptic because he believes that truth is harmful to the common man and the social order and should be reserved for superior minds (religion is for the rest). For this reason, Strauss rarely speaks in his own name, but rather expressed himself as a commentator on classical authors, such as Plato or Thomas Hobbes.
Moreover, much like his disciple Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind, 1988), he is careful to adorn his most radical ideas with humanist catchphrases, which often seem to contradict the core message. Despite the apparent difficulty, three basic ideas can easily be extracted from his political philosophy, which parallel those of Schmitt.
Summary of Leo Straussâ teachings.
- First, nations derive their strength from their myths, which are necessary for government and governance.
- Second, national myths have no necessary relationship with historical reality: they are socio-cultural constructions. The State has a duty to create and disseminate myths.
- Third, to be effective, any national myth must be marked by a clear distinction between good and evil, for it derives its cohesive strength from the hatred of an enemy nation.
As Abram Shulsky and Gary Schmitt write in an article âLeo Strauss and the World of Intelligenceâ (1999), for Strauss, âdeception is the norm in political lifeâ[337]âa rule neocons applied in the Office of Special Plans to fabricate the lie of Saddamâs weapons of mass destruction.
In his maturity, Strauss was an admirer of Machiavelli, whom he believes he understood better than anyone. In his Thoughts on Machiavelli, he parts from the intellectual trend of trying to rehabilitate the author of The Prince against the âsimple opinionâ which regards his work as immoral; such relativization of Machiavelliâs immorality âprevents one from doing justice to what is truly admirable in Machiavelli; the intrepidity of his thought, the grandeur of his vision, and the graceful subtlety of his speech.â âŠ
For this, Strauss is the guide, for âto discover from [Machiavelliâ] writings what he regarded as the truth is hard; it is not impossible.â Machiavelliâs truth is not a blinding light, but rather a bottomless abyss that only the accomplished philosopher can contemplate without turning into a beast: there is no afterlife, and neither good nor evil, and therefore the ruling elite shaping the destiny of their nation need not worry about the salvation of their own souls. Hence Machiavelli, according to Strauss, is a patriot of a superior kind.[338]
Only One Nation is Eternal: Israel
For Machiavelli, nations, not men, can aspire to immortality. But for the neocons, one nation only is truly eternal: Israel. Neo-conservatism can best be understood as a modern Jewish development of Machiavelliâs political thought. What characterizes the neoconservative movement is therefore not Judaism as a religious tradition, but rather Judaism as a political projectâi.e. Zionismâby Machiavellian means.
Neoconservatism is not Judaism as a religion, but a Jewish political project --Zionismâby Machiavellian means.
Some neocons, in fact, believe Machiavellism to be akin to Judaism. In the Jewish World Review of June 7, 1999, Michael Ledeen, who calls himself a âstudent of Machiavelli,â argues that Machiavelli may have been a âsecret Jew,â as were in his time thousands of families nominally converted to Catholicism under threat of expulsion or death. âListen to his political philosophy, and you will hear the Jewish music,â wrote Ledeen, citing in support of this claim Machiavelliâs contempt for the nonviolent ethics of Jesus and his admiration for the pragmatism of Moses, who was able to kill thousands from his own tribe in order to establish his authority.[339]
If Machiavellians, almost by definition, normally move in disguise, some Zionists today do not hesitate to advertise Machiavellism, like Obadiah Shoher in Samson Blinded: A Machiavellian Perspective on the Middle East Conflict (2006).[340]
Leo Strauss considered âWesternâ movies as a successful example of national mythic construction. In 1980, the neoconservatives bet all their chips on Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan and, twenty years later, on a born-again Christian invested with the mission of âridding the world of evil-doers.â
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Summary
Leo Strauss, (along with Leon Trotsky), were the fathers of the Neoconservative movement. Both were fiercely tribalistic Jews, and atheists. The recognized no standards of morality, no God, no after-life, and no soul. No intention of honoring truth.
They valued the ability of great minds (âthe philosopherâ) to deceive the public to guide public policy.
The valued the creation of mythic stories which the great minds would use to guide the masses (called âthe vulgarsâ).
Everything Leo Straussâ work was aimed at âThe Jewish Question.â The ascension of âThe Jewsâ into world domination. Pure power. Deceit, and no care at all for lesser peoples, truth, God or any morality.
