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RE: Civil War vs Election
Title: Mensaje
A
quick google of neocon will bring up other sources/sites as
well....
As neo-con godfather, Irving Kristol
once remarked, a neo-conservative is a "liberal who was mugged by reality". True
to that description, neo-conservatives generally originated on the left side of
the political spectrum and some times from the far left. Many neo-cons, such as
Kristol himself, have Trotskyite roots that are still reflected in their
polemical and organizational skills and ideological zeal.
Although a
number of prominent Catholics are neo-conservatives, the movement remains
predominantly Jewish, and the monthly journal that really defined
neo-conservatism over the past 35 years, Commentary, is published by the
American Jewish Committee. At the same time, however, neo-conservative attitudes
have reflected a minority position within the US Jewish community as most Jews
remain distinctly liberal in their political and foreign policy views.
Neo-conservative foreign policy positions, which have their origin in
opposition to the "new left" of the 1960s, fears over a return to US
isolationism during the Vietnam War and the progressive international isolation
of Israel in the wake of wars with its Arab neighbors in 1967 and 1973, have
been tactically very flexible over the past 35 years, but their key principles
have remained the same.
They begin with the basic foreign policy realism
found in the pessimistic views of human nature and international diplomacy of
the English political philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, that neo-cons share with most
US practitioners: that "the condition of man [in a state of nature] ... is a
condition of war of everyone against everyone." Or, as Machiavelli, another
favorite thinker of the neo-cons, wrote, "Men are more ready for evil than for
good."
But neo-cons take "man's" capacity for evil particularly
seriously, and for understandable reasons. For neo-conservatives, the Nazi
Holocaust that killed some 6 million Jews during World War II is the seminal
experience of the 20th century. Not only was it a genocide unparalleled in its
thoroughness, the Holocaust also wiped out family members of hundreds of
thousands of Jewish citizens in the United States, including, for example, close
relatives of the parents of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.
For
neo-conservatives, as for most Jews, the Holocaust represents absolute evil, and
the factors which contributed to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and the
subsequent extermination of Jews must be fought at all costs.
"The
defining moment in our history was certainly the Holocaust," Richard Perle, a
key neo-con and leading advocate of war with Iraq, recently told BBC's Panorama.
"It was the destruction, the genocide of a whole people, and it was the failure
to respond in a timely fashion to a threat that was clearly gathering. We don't
want that to happen again, and when we have the ability to stop totalitarian
regimes we should do so, because when we fail to do so, the results are
catastrophic," he said.
For neo-conservatives, the 1938 Munich
agreement, under which Hitler was permitted by Britain and France to take over
Czechoslovakia, is the epitome of appeasement that led directly to the
Holocaust. As a result, Munich and appeasement are constantly invoked in their
rhetoric as a way to summon up the will to resist and defeat the enemy of the
day. Hence, almost every conflict in which the United States has been engaged
since the late 1960s - from Vietnam to Central America to Yugoslavia to the "war
on terror" in Iraq and against al-Qaeda - has been portrayed as a new Munich in
which the enemy represents a threat virtually on a par with Hitler.
The
resulting worldview tends to Manichaeism - the notion that the world consists of
a permanent struggle between the forces of good and evil, light and dark (an
idea which incidentally accords very well both with the thinking of the
Christian Right, not to mention of Bush himself). As Michael Ledeen, a close
collaborator of Perle's at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) told the same
BBC program, "I know the struggle against evil is going to go on forever."
Three major factors are seen as having contributed to the Holocaust: the
failure of the liberal Weimar Republic in Germany to prevent the Nazis' rise;
"appeasement"; and US isolationism that kept Washington from intervening in
World War II earlier.
Although neo-cons profess devotion to liberal
democracy, they have never hesitated to assail "liberalism", or what they
sometimes call with their Christian Right allies "secular humanism", whose
relativism, in their view, can lead to "a culture of appeasement", nihilism or
worse. Thus, even while supposedly defending "liberal" and democratic ideals,
their attitude is at best ambivalent.
.....
Wolfowitz was leftist? I did not know that! Please, tell a bit about
it.
David Preiss, M.Phil.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de
Chile www.puc.cl
Phone: 56-2-3547174
Peter, do you have a source for your statement that
Jews vote(d) overwhelmingly democratic? i am assuming that the statistical
picture would be more complex -- & show, for instance, perhaps, a
generational, if not occupational, divide... Some of the neocons who
shaped the international policies of this administration were once
left-y Jews (Wolfowitz &??)... They used their old Idealism
(things CAN be different) in the service of (?) adult ego-centrism
(?) (i.e., the world would be a better place if it behaved and
thought like us) to design US imperialism.
Well, I'm uneasy about sending this off,
but in the spirit of Veterans Day and trouble-making, I
will....
Judy
I'm sure there are many factors. Florida is
also home to many Jews (who vote overwhelmingly Democratic) and African
Americans (also Dems) and many other relocators from the north. I doubt if
I'm really qualified to make sense of it....p
At 01:57 PM
11/11/2004 -0300, you wrote:
Yes, that was what I realized. But I was wondering
whether there was something else and what was the relation between
neo-conservadurism and the old slave traditions. On the other hand, the
South is voting Republican since a long time ago. In addition, in some
cases, such as Florida, the relation is not straightforward, I guess,
since it is linked with the political behavior of the Hispanics and
Cuban politics. In short, even though there is a relation, I wondered
about its nature and local peculiarities.
David Preiss,
M.Phil.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Pontificia
Universidad Catolica de Chile www.puc.cl
PACE Center at Yale
University www.yale.edu/pace
Homepage: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~ddp6/
Phone:
56-2-3547174
E-mail: david.preiss@yale.edu or davidpreiss@yale.edu
- -----Mensaje original-----
- De: Peter Smagorinsky [mailto:smago@coe.uga.edu]
- Enviado el: Thursday, November 11, 2004 1:30 PM
- Para: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
- Asunto: RE: Civil War vs Election
- only simply right now (I've got a manuscript review to complete):
the maps overlap to suggest that a great deal of Bush's support comes
from states that once advocated slavery (and where the vestiges of
slavery are still evident in housing segregation, economic
disparities, etc.). Not a very hopeful sign in these times. p
- At 12:07 PM 11/11/2004 -0300, you wrote:
- This map is worth discussing.
- Beyond the descriptive coincidences, how would you put the match
in a narrative framework, Peter?
-
- David Preiss, M.Phil.
- -------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile www.puc.cl
- PACE Center at Yale University www.yale.edu/pace
- Homepage: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~ddp6/
- Phone: 56-2-3547174
- E-mail: david.preiss@yale.edu or davidpreiss@yale.edu
- -----Mensaje original-----
- De: Peter Smagorinsky [mailto:smago@coe.uga.edu]
- Enviado el: Thursday, November 11, 2004 7:51 AM
- Para: Recipient list suppressed
- Asunto: Fwd: Civil War vs Election